Enfoque Ixcán History

Guatemala’s Ixcán region, with over 100,000 residents, is located in the northwestern part of the country near the Mexican border. In 1996, while visiting the area, Portland, OR, optometrist Dr. Scott Pike met a poor Mayan subsistence farmer, named Pedro Chom. Pedro lived in a cooperatively formed village, Santa Maria Tzeja.

This chance meeting would change both their lives.

Every member of the co-operative is expected to volunteer for the good of the village and Pedro contributed a few hours of his time each week to work as a “health promoter”. To compensate for the lack of doctors in these remote areas, the government trains local residents on the basics of health care. From minor injuries to delivering a baby, they become the “health-needs go-to people”. Although he took pride in and enjoyed his work as a health promoter Pedro was going to quit his job because he was having difficulty reading the instructions on the medicines he dispensed to his patients.

Dr. Pike realized that all Pedro needed was reading glasses. Like most other people in the Ixcán, he had no access to eye care and was too poor to afford it. The nearest eye doctor was six to ten hours away in the city of Coban. Few could afford the ride (in the back of a truck), the time away from their farms and families, or the doctors fees. When Dr. Pike returned to Portland he made up a pair of glasses and sent them back to Pedro.

Dr. Pike returned to the village the next year and with Pedro’s assistance launched an eye care project for this village. Enfoque Ixcán was born. The name Enfoque Ixcán means “Focusing on the Ixcán”. Through the years Pedro took on more and more of the village’s healthcare responsibilities until his volunteer work  evolved into a full-time, paid, position, called the village health facilitator.

The Eye Health Promoters

Since 1996 Dr. Pike has methodically developed the project to bring primary eye care to this extraordinarily under-served population. Every year he and other Enfoque Ixcán board members spend a week in Ixcán teaching Pedro, Felipe Panjoj, who started working with Enfoque Ixcán in 2005, Carlos Quinilla, who started in 2017, and Roxana Larios, who started as an eye health promoter in 2019, the basics of eye care including anatomy, optics, refraction, eye glasses dispensing, and disease recognition. Roxana began working with us when she was only 16 years old, accompanying surgery patients to the eye hospital.

Frequently Enfoque Ixcán doctors introduce new equipment, and over time the eye health promoters’ skills and abilities have developed. To date they have examined over 6,325 people from more than 100 different villages. Glasses are dispensed from an inventory which are re-stocked twice a year.

These Eye Health Promoters (EHPs) work from our new clinic building in the main trading town and municipal center for Ixcán, Playa Grande. They have office hours 6 days a week and see patients from all the communities of Ixcán. Each year the EHPs make 6 or more trips to an eye clinic, Visualiza, 5 hours away, accompanying patients needing eye surgeries. Since 2002 Enfoque Ixcán has funded over 970 eye surgeries, including over 718 sight-restoring cataract surgeries.

Good eye care also includes education and prevention. Our eye health promoters have sun glasses available for protection from the ultra-violet rays of the sun and lubricating eye drops to protect from the drying effects from living around wood fires and the dust and wind. Informational brochures have been made for the teachers and the general public of the Ixcán. In this way they learn about vision, eye conditions, eye health, and the prevention of eye problems for all ages.