NOMMS News

On Thursday the eye clinic split in two so that half of the team could visit a school and a retirement home outside of the city while the rest held down the fort at the hospital. We departed for the school at 7:30am and arrived to a room full of kids ranging in age from two to thirteen, all anxiously waiting to have their eyes read. The nuns who ran the school were incredibly welcoming and thankful that we came to visit the children and fit them with glasses. We saw over 100 kids, most of whom said they had trouble seeing the board in class, and fit them with glasses.

One case was particularly challenging. We used the auto-refractor to read the eyes of Alex, 11 years old, and received a relatively high prescription of -5.00 in the right eye and -5.25 in the left. In the first bag of glasses closest to that range I found a single pair that fit those numbers, an old,  worn out, and frankly ugly pair with huge gold frames. Alex looked skeptical, but I asked him to try them anyway. He put them on and said “muy barroso” (very blurry) and took them off as quickly as he could, with tears in his eyes at the thought of having to wear those awful glasses. With the help of one of the high school girls who came to volunteer with us, I told him not to worry, I wouldn’t send him home with a pair like that. He wiped his eyes and we proceeded to try approximately 40 pairs of glasses, none of which worked for him, as Alex became steadily more discouraged, believing we wouldn’t find anything to help him. After re-reading his eyes and trying several more pairs, we finally settled on some that helped him that he was happy with, and his face brightened with relief at being able to see clearly. I handed him a nice case for his new glasses and the quiet boy gave me a little hug before he left, clutching his new glasses in their case.

At the same time, another little girl was being fitted with her new glasses by volunteer Eric. The pretty blue frames, which matched her dress perfectly, had previously belonged to the son of another of our eye clinic volunteers, Povy. Seeing this single pair of glasses make its way from owner to donation box, to the Harahan Lion’s Club who reads the prescriptions for us, back to the NOMMS warehouse and down to Nicaragua, and onto the face of this little girl who needs them, was really an exciting process.

Before heading back to the hospital we also visited a retirement home, the Hogar de Ancianos San Francisco de Asis, where volunteer John patiently used the auto-refractor to read the eyes of over 25 residents and a handful of staff members from the home. We carefully marked the prescription readouts with the names and ages of the retirees, who will be delivered glasses and reading glasses from our inventory in a few days.

Meanwhile, the eye clinic staff back at the hospital was seeing patients of their own, while dealing with the fact that the lights in the eye clinic room went out partway through the day. Despite the fact that they had to work in dim conditions and were short-staffed, they still saw nearly 250 patients of their own, brining the day’s total to nearly 400. All in all, it was an incredibly successful day for the eye clinic team!