Guatemala

• 2019 - Humanity First: Gift of Sight, Antigua Guatemala
• 2018 - Humanity First: Gift of Sight, Antigua Guatemala
• 2017 - Humanity First: Gift of Sight, Antigua Guatemala
• 2016 - Humanity First: Gift of Sight, Antigua Guatemala
• 2014 - Humanity First: Gift of Sight, Antigua Guatemala
• 2013 - Humanity First: Gift of Sight, Antigua Guatemala
• 2012 - Humanity First USA
• 2012 - Hajirah Saeed, MD | Charles Bouchard, MD
• 2012 - Shuchi Patel, MD | Eileen Gable OD | Samir Vira, MD
• 2010 - Eileen Gable, OD | David Yoo, MD | Nikki Saraiya, MD |
• 2010 - Robert J. Barnes, MD | Peter Russo, OD | R. Tracy Williams, OD | Omar Krad, MD
• 2010 - Charles Bouchard, MD | Linda Novak, MD | John Clements, MD |
• 2009 - Eileen Gable, OD | Peter Russo, OD | R. Tracy Williams, OD
• 2008 - Charles Bouchard, MD
• 2007 - Johann Ohly, MD | Joseph Doe, MD | Emily Velotta, MD
• 2006 - Brent Hayek, MD | Matthew Kim, MD
• 2003 - Geoffrey Emerick, MD | Tracy Williams, OD
• 2001 - Tracy Williams, OD

In March 2016, a group of volunteers from Loyola traveled to Guatemala with the Humanity First Gift of Sight Organization on their 6th annual week-long eye camp. The camp provides free eye care to rural Guatemalans funded by donations made through Humanity First and hospital donated equipment. Ophthalmic pharmaceutical companies have also contributed in order to keep the surgeries free for the patients.

In the past few years, the Gift of Sight team has set up camps over multiple cities in Guatemala to provide service to as many locals as possible. In congruence with performing the surgeries, the doctors' part of the Gift of Sight team will be teaching the local doctors and nurses new surgical techniques. Triage clinics have been taking place since early October with the support of Humanity First Guatemala, and thus far there are fifty cataract surgeries and fifty pterygium surgeries scheduled for the upcoming trip.
This year's Gift of Sight mission has been organized and carried out under the guidance of Gift of Sight Program Director and ophthalmologist, Dr. Ahsan Khan and Assistant Director, Tayyeba Ali. Lead ophthalmologists for the 2016 camp are Dr. Khan and Dr. Bouchard, who is the Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois. They will be joined by ophthalmologists Eligius Lelis and his son Andrius, Dr Bouchard’s daughter Olivia, her cousin Clara Shelton, Dr. Syed Saqib Ali, anesthesiologist, and will be supported by technicians, residents, medical students, and photojournalists.

The Humanity First Guatemala team made this trip possible. The three women in the middle, Stephanie, Claudia and Denise, ran the show. Stephanie and Denise were scrub techs, working in the OR and providing necessary translation between our patients and medical team. Claudia was in charge of organizing the patients, their charts and their follow-up/post-op care. Photo: Right is Dr. Rima Patel, a resident at Loyola under Dr. Charles Bouchard who is pictured on left.

One of our patients was an eleven year-old boy, he came in with his mother. She has nine children. This boy got hit in the head with a ball when he was nine, causing a severe cataract to form. Our team, specifically Dr. Khan, helped this boy regain his sight in his right eye. Top Left: Eye exam by Dr. Tayyeba Ali. Right: receiving anesthesia with Dr. Saqib Ali and volunteer Clara Shelton. Bottom photo: post-op Day 1 with volunteer Olivia Bouchard.

We had tight quarters for the pterygium cases; transforming a “walk-through” room into a double bed OR. Dr. Bouchard and Dr. Patel performed a total of 35 cases in 3 days. Below: Dr. Bouchard with volunteers Olivia Bouchard and Clara Shelton.

Our team met with each patient for post-op updates at the Humanity First site in Antigua following the surgeries. We talked with each patient, telling them the results of their surgeries; 95% were successful, and how to care for their eye in the upcoming weeks to bring about full recovery.

After three days of surgeries, our team spent the last few days traveling through Antiqua and Guatemala City. We experienced multiple cuisines, ranging from Argentinian steak to French Nutella and banana crepes. During our crepe dinner, we were lucky enough to see one of the volcanoes send out a bit of lava and smoke during the late evening. Quite a fantastic event!

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On October 25, 2014, Humanity First USA's Gift of Sight team arrived in Guatemala City for the fifth annual week-long eye camp. The camp provides free eye care to rural Guatemalans funded by donations made through Humanity First and hospital donated equipment. Ophthalmic pharmaceutical companies have also contributed in order to keep the surgeries free for the patients.

In the past few years, the Gift of Sight team has set up camps over multiple cities in Guatemala to provide service to as many locals as possible. In congruence with performing the surgeries, the doctors' part of the Gift of Sight team will be teaching the local doctors and nurses new surgical techniques. Triage clinics have been taking place since early October with the support of Humanity First Guatemala, and thus far there are fifty cataract surgeries and fifty pterygium surgeries scheduled for the upcoming trip.

This year's Gift of Sight mission has been organized and carried out under the guidance of Gift of Sight Program Director and ophthalmologist, Dr. Ahsan Khan and Assistant Director, Aysha Alburaki. Lead ophthalmologists for the 2014 camp are Dr. Khan and Dr. Bouchard, who is the Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois. They will be joined by ophthalmologists Dr. Karen Small, Dr. Asad Movahedan, Dr. Majid Rouhbakhsh, and Dr. Amir Mehralian, Juan Nuñez, scrub technician, Dr. Syed Saqib Ali, anesthesiologist, and will be supported by technicians, residents, medical students, and photojournalists.

We cannot do this without your support: please consider making a contribution— with a $100 donation, you can cover costs for one cataract surgery and help give the gift of sight.

Please visit our Gift of Sight blog

Restoring Communities and Building a Future are the guiding principles for Humanity First USA. Humanity First works to assist people afflicted by natural disasters, war, and poverty by first providing the needed disaster relief services and then by building capacity of these communities. Our aim is to restore dignity by providing the resources to help people get back on their feet quickly.

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Johann Ohly, MD, was the third resident to participate in the newly established resident rotation in Guatemala. Johann spent several weeks in Flores performing surgeries, running clinics and teaching the Guatemalan residents. His mission trip synopsis is as follows...

Hello all, Guatemala Synopsis, February 2007

My first real impression of Guatemala was the car ride from the airport in Flores to the residence in San Benito. Apparently the only traffic law in Guatemala appears to be that one has to break all laws at all times. To make the driving even more perilous, pigs, dogs, cows, chicken, horses, mules and goats were all over the place, sometimes wallowing suicidally in the middle of the street. Some roads were under construction, evidence of the upcoming election. Huge machines dug deep trenches in the dirt roads, followed by men sorting the rocks that turned up and by some criteria discarding large ones at the roadside. A steam roller would compact the road only to have the huge machines repeat their havoc and the flock of workmen continue their onerous task. This process continued for the two weeks I spent in San Benito along the same two mile stretch of road without signs of imminent paving. When we lost internet service in the first week, it took three days to restore service not from technical difficulty, rather motivational inertia. The driver hired to bring patients from an outlying village told us at 6:30am that he was on his way and never showed up. Lunch hour spanned from about 11:30am to 2:30pm, the longest hour of my life.

I include these vignettes to illustrate the differences in nearly all elements of daily life and interpersonal expectations. As an American one is used to working 60+ hours per week, especially during residency. One takes for granted excellent service when it is contracted for. But the values of hard work and reliability appear to have less priority in rural Guatemala. People that can be relied on to keep their word are difficult to find and worth their weight in gold. Fortunately Linda Novak has found many of these people to make things happen in the Peten area. The mission benefited greatly from these connections, but we still had difficulties.

My first week started with a two day jornada in Dolores, a village about 85 kilometers from San Benito. We were hosted by the Dominican malnutrition hospital which, as you can imagine, has very ample and good food. We saw about 40-45 patients over two days and gave out many glasses, sunglasses, artificial tears and glaucoma drops. Six patients were surgical candidates and transportation was arranged to bring them to the Hospital Shalom in San Benito for surgery on Wednesday. When we called the driver on Wednesday morning he told us he was on his way. Then we heard from the staff at the malnutrition hospital that nobody had come to get the two patients that came for surgery. So they were put on a bus and arrived at 10:30am for 8:00am surgery. We did their pterygium surgery and arranged for them to take a bus back to Dolores.

Out of the six people scheduled for surgery only two came. This is a testament to several factors that impede access to care in rural Guatemala; money, transportation and fear. We had taken care of the first two issues by charging minimal fee for surgery and providing transportation, however eye surgery is not routine as it is in the US. The surgical techniques are not as refined, and as a result more bad outcomes occur. Patients hear about situations where a friend or relative was blinded by surgical complication and as a result avoid surgery. The Peten program is like a new practice opening its doors in many ways. Locals are still finding out about us by word of mouth and the jornadas. If people continue to have good experiences with Loyola doctors and know that they will be able to rely on them arriving during a certain part of the year, more will trust and more will come. Good surgical results will help allay some of the fear of eye surgery.

On Thursday we operated on patients from Santa Rita who were screened for surgery the week before I arrived. Four out of eight people scheduled were brought for surgery. One man had come all the way from Mexico to have an extremely dense cataract removed. After the two pterygium surgeries were completed, we called for this man and were told that he had left. Apparently he had second thoughts and headed back to Mexico, still blinded by his cataract. We did an extracapsular cataract surgery on the last patient and called it a day.

The surgeries are done at Hospital Shalom that has converted its ER to an OR while the true OR facilities are being completed. The facility was very good for surgery and well stocked. Many of the donated surgical supplies I brought were superfluous as they have been accumulating over time with few surgeries done at Hospital Shalom. Once a larger volume of surgeries is done, I am sure that we will need to replenish them. Having each resident that does the Guatemala trip put together a list of needed items while in Guatemala will help guide future residents to bring the necessary items. Another consideration for future trips will be to make the surgical setup mobile, to be able to take the OR to the jornada thus eliminating unreliable patient transportation as a limiting factor. This is by no means as easy as it would seem and will require logistical planning and possibly capital investment in reliable transportation.

After providing eye care at Hospital Shalom’s wheelchair jornada on Saturday, the medical students and I spent Sunday and Monday at the Mayan ruins in Tikal. It is really awe-inspiring to see what the Mayans were able to accomplish with the limited (by our standards) scientific and technological resources.

Week two was spent seeing patients at the Dominican Dispensario eye clinic in San Benito, following up on post-ops and seeing patients in a local nursing home that was recently opened. During our follow-up on post-ops in Santa Rita, I cemented my Spanish skills by helping a wife pick out a pair of sunglasses for her husband. I must say that even though rural Guatemalans may not have many material possessions, their appearance is very important. If someone tells a very nearsighted person who is blind without glasses that their glasses don’t look good, they will not wear the glasses.

On Thursday and Friday of the second week Linda Novak and I attended a conference in Guatemala City hosted by Rudy Gutierrez. The topics were mainly refractive and phacoemulsification cataract surgery, an interesting choice since most surgeons who attended don’t do refractive surgery and are still doing extracapsular cataract surgery. Nonetheless, I did get a chance to meet some of the ophthalmology residents and practice my Spanish comprehension. Linda Novak knew and approached many of the ophthalmologists who attended the meeting regarding epidemiological research. The idea would be to collect ICD-9 diagnostic information from ophthalmologists via an interactive online website.

Unfortunately the conference prevented me from giving lectures and teaching. I think that there is a significant need to work with our ophthalmology resident colleagues in Guatemala. From discussions with them, I discovered that much of their clinical and surgical training is on their self-guided and by no means as standardized across residency programs as in the US. On future trips, inviting the residents to join us in eye jornadas in Chichicastenango and Coban would provide an opportunity not only to give lectures but also to exchange surgical techniques. We don’t have much experience with many of the procedures that they are comfortable doing, like pterygium and extracapsular surgery. We may be able help the Guatemalans learn other techniques like phaco and glaucoma surgery. The potential partnership extends beyond our travel to Guatemala. Many residents may be interested in coming to the US to learn, to make connections for possible clinical fellowships in the US, and to have a good time.

I was invited to spend my last weekend in Antigua at Rudy Gutierrez’s house. I didn’t see much of Rudy, but Antigua was a wonderful end to my travels with a symphony concert in the main square on Saturday night (complete with military band, marimbas, and the 1812 Overture) and a Lent pilgrimage on Sunday morning.

Guatemala is a beautiful country with spectacular variation in geography and a great need for eye care in the rural areas. I think Guatemala is very important in the future of Central American ophthalmology as many of the future doctors are currently training in Guatemala. We can have a positive impact on the quality of their training and raise expectations for quality of care in Guatemala by working with the ophthalmology residents in the formative time of their careers.

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Joseph Doe, MD, spent several weeks in Guatemala performing surgeries, running clinics and teaching the Guatemalan residents. Joe was the fourth resident to participate in the second year program.

Joseph Doe, MD, spent several weeks in Guatemala performing surgeries, running clinics and teaching the Guatemalan residents. Joe was the fourth resident to participate in the second year program.

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Emily Velotta, MD, was the first female to participate in the Guatemala resident rotation program. Emily provided eye care, performed many surgeries, treated a variety of eye diseases, made surgical referrals, and dispensed more than 200 pairs of glasses in April 2007.

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Brent Hayek, MD, was the first resident to participate in the new resident rotation in Guatemala. He spent several weeks there building a clinic from the ground up as well as providing eye care to the natives.

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Matthew Kim, MD, was the second resident to participate in the newly established resident rotation in Guatemala. Matt spent several weeks in Guatemala performing surgeries, running clinics and teaching the Guatemalan residents.

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Geoffrey Emerick, MD, assistant professor and director of the glaucoma service, joined a team of ophthalmologists and support staff at the Hospital de la Familia in Nuevo Progreso, Guatemala. There they treated more than 500 patients and performed approximately 200 cataract, glaucoma and pterygium surgeries in seven days.

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R. Tracy Williams, OD, and Geoffrey Emerick, MD, traveled to Guatemala as members of two separate teams. In a joint effort between the Rotary Club, the Lions Club and several church organizations, Dr. Williams, clinical assistant professor and director of the low vision and visual rehabilitation service, worked in a clinic near Coban, Guatemala. During their four-day visit, the team of ophthalmologists, optometrists and audiologists examined over 1,000 people, treating a variety of eye diseases, making surgical referrals, and dispensing more than 1,000 pairs of glasses and 500 hearing aids.

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