Where do I start?

I guess with the reason we went to Peru in the first place. A friend of ours is the Program Director for Olive Branch Ministries, International. That means she begs, cajoles and twists the arms of a lot of doctors, nurses, PAs and other medically-related people into donating their time and paying their own way to usually remote places in Central and South America to conduct week-long medical clinics for people who might otherwise receive no care or treatment.

So how did we end up with all these doctors? Eyeglasses. In addition to the opportunity to see a doctor, Olive Branch offers vision screening for both reading and distance glasses and the only qualification needed for this chore is the ability to stand on your feet for long periods of time, point to a chart and say important things in Spanish, like ¿Para leer o para lejos? (for reading or for distance?) and ¿Mas claro o menos claro? (more clear or less clear?).

We’ve done this before; Mom went to Guadalajara, we both went to El Salvador and now we’ve done Peru. The question is will we do it again? It was a hard, hard, trip. We stayed in a relatively nice hotel in Lima and took a 2 hour bus ride each day out to Ventanilla, a large community of shacks in a barren wasteland where Comunidad de Niños Sagrada Familia –a large orphanage - is located (lots more about that later). Nine to five we tested vision and dispensed glasses to hundreds of people daily. Then we got back on the bus and took a different route back to Lima.

The different route was not for sight seeing. There’s nothing worth seeing in Lima. It is a dirty, arid industrial area with no trees, few parks or lawns to speak of and sand and grime everywhere. It is a coastal city, but the beaches are rocky and the ocean is a dumping ground. No, we took a different route – each and every time we made the trip – because the driver could not consistently find his way there and back! I am not making this up. We never went the same way – coming or going – in 12 trips! On the one occasion the driver got lucky and got us back to the hotel in less than 2 hours we gave him a standing ovation!

Vision testing in this environment is frustrating. There is not a language barrier – we work with very capable interpreters who in a few hours can do the job better than Barbara and I can – but there is a mind-set barrier. People will come in who are obviously blind as a bat. They cannot even see the big ‘E’ but when we start trying lenses on them they complain that they are too strong, or that they make it blurred. We work our way down to the very lowest prescriptions and they still say too strong. We explain that that’s the weakest we have and we can’t help them and they sit there and look at you. We explain that if you are not used to wearing glasses it can look strange and “strong.” No deal. So they go away disappointed and we stay there frustrated.

In reading glasses, Barbara had to be very careful that the test set had identical frames or the person would adjust their vision requirements to their frame preferences. And make no mistake; these people know how to work the system. Some come for unneeded glasses simply because they know they can sell them later. At one clinic they discovered someone had gotten hold of a medical form (the "ticket") and sold forged copies. The only problem was they use metric sizes down there and the page was not 8 1/2 by 11!

But every once in a while, you get someone like the little old lady in El Salvador that nearly danced out of the clinic she was so happy. She told everyone along the way, “I can see now. I can see.” Or the two teen-age sisters this trip who literally could not see the chart, and walked out with -7 prescriptions (we’re talking coke-bottle thick, folks) who could now see clearly. They may be few and far between, but you do get your blessings.