Eye Clinic

Aware of the fact that I have slightly been neglecting blogging, I am going to write about something that happened back in October. It was an amazing weekend; here's what happened:

We were visited by some ophthalmologists down here in Tlaxiaco at GFM! They had been planning on coming down to do an eye clinic in October, and we were all excited to see how the clinic would work out. The ophthalmologists brought barely any clothes because they filled their luggage with an eye machine (to calculate the degree of myopia or hyperopia of each patient), and hundreds, near one thousand, of pairs of eye glasses (no exaggeration here, both various prescriptions and readers). We were praying that all of this gear would make it through Mexican security at the airports on the way down to Oaxaca. It didn't. At least not right away. So for the first part of the week they were here we were unable to do the clinics because they didn't have any of their eyeglasses, or even the machine to read the prescription needed for each person. After four trips to Oaxaca, and a lot of empty promises from Mexican officials, we were finally able to recover the goods! We ended up doing three days worth of all-day clinics, each in a different village. We would have each Mexican sign in, and take a seat. Then one by one we would measure their eyes with the eye machine, and give them a prescription. They would head out the the boxes full of eyeglasses (which we at GFM all sorted through and organized for 3 hrs, actually it was 10-1am). We would help them find their correct prescription, chosen from all of the previously-donated eyeglasses. Then we would have them read a passage from the Bible or look out into the distance to make sure their eyesight was better with that particular pair. Some individuals could barely see anything and the transformation was dramatic! It was so great to see the appreciation and excitement that some of the locals experienced upon the being given the gift of sight again for the first time in many years.