...love is blind

A group of optometry students and doctors came down from Chicago to hand out free glasses and perform eye surgeries on the less fortunate for four days in a hospital in the outskirts of town, in Juan Diez. The program, called VOSH, is pretty big in the States and does some great work.

I was drafted to help translate eyeglass prescriptions and hand out some of the glasses. It was amazing how many people came out for the free glasses. People actually camped out starting at midnight the night before to get the chance to be fitted with a new pair of peepers. What were these guys thinking? I mean, I'd camp out for days for some Britney Spears tickets, but glasses? I guess we all have our priorities... For most of the poor in Panama, who make around 10 bucks a day, glasses are definitely a luxury worth waiting around for.

Having no experience at all in optometry, I had no idea how to read prescriptions but gave it the old college try. I remember my first patient: she was an old grandmother of about 60, who wanted something to make her look sexy for her husband. I told her if those fat-rimmed coke-bottle tri-focals don’t do the trick, nothing else will. With a feeling of new-found sexiness and thick pink Elton John-esque spectacles, she strutted happily back to her man.

The VOSH crew also did about 10 operations per day, mainly on cataracts. Well, about a month after the event, I was in an old 1984 cab with a cabbie who started rambling on about the University of Illinois. Being used to cabbies whose conversations are a string of semi-coherent gibberish, I wasn’t the least bit surprised when the cabbie jumped from talking about chicken soup to the fighting Illinois mid-sentence. What I didn’t realize was that the fighting Illinois he referred to were a group of docs from the VOSH clinic who fought off his cataract a month earlier.

As I yanked my arm back into the cab while he swerved to deftly avoid a road sign, I told him they might have operated on the wrong eye. He said he was practically blind before the operation, but now he can distinguish shapes and colors – which more than qualified him to keep driving a cab.