Eye Extravaganza

A few weeks ago an optometry brigade from Memphis, Tennessee came to visit Santa Barbara and I was able to help them translate. During that week my co-workers from Agua Pura were working in the campo and came across a number of people who seemed like they could benefit from the services of the brigade. So they decided to bring them back to Santa Barbara to be seen by the doctors. They lived about an hour away so they came back with my co-workers at the end of the work day and spent the night at the houses of Nineth, the supervisor of Agua Pura and one of the other Agua Pura volunteers and were seen by the brigade the next day. It turns out that two of the old men had cataracts and needed to have surgery to remove them. The surgery was to be done in San Pedro, the second largest city in Honduras, about two hours away from Santa Barbara. We advised the men of this and took them back to their homes that night and forgot about it for awhile. Then last Sunday my co-workers were out working in the campo and remembered that the men were scheduled for surgery the next day so they should take them in. So that night they brought back Don Justino, Don Chico, Laura and Eve to spend the night in Santa Barbara and take to San Pedro the next day. Don Justino is about 80 and almost completely blind. Laura is Don Justino’s neighbor and supposedly came along to help him because he can hardly see (later we figured out that she just wanted to go get her eyes checked). Don Chico is also in his 80s and isn’t quite blind, but is completely batty. Eve is a teenage girl who got it into her head that she wanted to go to San Pedro to work so she asked Nineth, if she could find her work. Nineth called an old friend who lives in San Pedro and they arranged for the young girl to go and live with her and work as her household employee. So Monday morning we all met and planned our schedule for the week (something that I am trying to get the group to do to improve organization). In the week plan we assumed it would take about five hours to deal with the eye surgery. Two hours to drive them to San Pedro, an hour to get them settled and two hours to drive back. Well, as I am learning about Honduras nothing is ever simple and things always take longer than expected. They spent the day in the clinic doing the initial check-up and trying to figure out who would pay for the surgery and didn’t return to Santa Barbara until 9 pm. While in San Pedro they dropped the young girl off at the old friend’s house to start work. The surgery was scheduled for Thursday so then we had to juggle the three of them for the rest of the week and try to figure out who was going to take them back to San Pedro, who would pay for the surgery, where they would stay and who would take care of them after the surgery. In the meantime my co-workers were housing, feeding and caring for Don Justino, Don Chico and Laura. Eventually we dropped Laura off because we realized she wasn’t really there to take care of Don Justino, she was just there to get her eyes checked, which she did and they were fine. Finally we got in touch with family members of each of the men and explained the situation to them. The initial reaction was to ask us to bring them back to San Pedro and pay for everything and continue to take care of their fathers. The families didn’t seem to have any sense of gratitude for any of the work we had done to take care of their families and seemed to expect us to do everything for them. Eventually we convinced sons of each of the men that it was their responsibility to take care of their fathers both physically and financially and they left with them to return to San Pedro on Thursday for their cataract surgery (hopefully all went well because we haven’t heard back from either of them). Oh, and then the young girl decided she didn’t like the work after two days so came back to Santa Barbara and stayed with Nineth for another two days and then finally went back home.
When my co-workers with Agua Pura first offered to take these two men to get their eyes checked out two weeks ago none of us had any idea what we were getting ourselves into. Overall it was a pretty frustrating week because it pretty much took four days to deal with the mess and meant that we succeeded in doing very little work. It was also frustrating because the families didn’t seem to want to help themselves and just assumed that we should do all the work and pay for everything. When working in the campo we see varying levels of poverty and we all have an inherent desire to help people that need help and often make promises without thinking about the consequences. This experience taught me that you just can’t help every person you see even if they really need help. At the end of the week Agua Pura decided as a team that we need to focus on our primary objective, which is to run a successful organization to provide people with access to clean water. This means that we will have to say no to people who need our help in other ways, which is of course unfortunate. I think this experience was important for me because it has taught me that I shouldn’t make promises to help people before I know what keeping that promise will entail. Also, I have to accept that I can’t help everybody and if I try I’ll drive myself crazy and carry the weight of the world on my shoulders and probably get depressed and decide I’m a failure and drop out of the Peace Corps. I’d prefer not to have any of that happen, so I’m going to focus on my priorities and do the best I can do with the time and resources I have.