The NGO Wuqu' Kawoq is committed to facilitating excellence and linguistic competence in medical care delivery in the indigenous highlands of Guatemala. There is currently an extreme scarcity of medical projects in Guatemala, national or international, that provide care or educational resources in the indigenous Mayan languages despite the fact that the majority of the population knows Spanish as a second language only or not at all. We believe that for national medical professional and international aid workers to ignore first languages in their practices is negligent and irresponsible as well as a barrier to providing excellent care.

To address this deficit, we propose to cultivate partnerships and fund targeted sustainable projects at the intersection of indigenous language rights, literacy, and the provision of medical care. Such projects might include: financial and logistical support for indigenous community ethnomedical cooperatives, such as lay midwife cooperatives, that provide care in indigenous languages; the development or translation and dissemination of written medical resources, such as dictionaries, midwife training manuals, ethnobotanical usage guides, in indigenous Mayan languages; literacy and continuing-education training for ethnomedical practioners; support for the development of indigenous-language allopathic services.