A smile is worth more than you think
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| Primary school kids at eyeglass distribution point-wanted picture with Twiggy the Twiga who you can barely see at the flagpole. |
With no rooms left, I set
up a blanket out in the yard and laid eyeglasses out by prescription noted on
the small stickers attached to most pairs of glasses. I found several pair that were odd or as an
intelligence test would say not like the others. One was a small pair for a child, a second
was a pair with one very strong positive prescription in one eye and a strong
negative prescription in the other eye, and a third pair that were so thick
that coke bottle glasses did not even truly describe them correctly. Some of you have heard this story before so
please feel free to skip to the bottom paragraphs under the label Tanzania
2015.
The very first day of
eyeglasses went very well after I was able to set some tests up for seeing in
the distance since I had some bible tracts we could use for up close vision
tests. I had set up so that they would
visit all the other medical services first and I would be last as they
left. Most folks took no more than 20
minutes until they found a pair that fit their needs. Some however took closer to an hour. I spent most of the day with at least 5
people being helped at once. About
midday, in the hottest part of the day with the sun blazing down on my small
area outside the buildings, a young lady came up with a girl of about 11 or 12
years of age in tow. The lady was a
teacher and the girl was one of her students.
The girl was in a dress I would assume was probably her best, something
a young girl would wear on Easter Sunday proudly. She was shy but after a small amount of
coaxing it became clear she had trouble focusing on things near and she was
having trouble reading. We tried several
pairs of glasses that should have helped but they all seemed to make it more
difficult for her to see clearly the pages of the printed tract. After about half an hour she was obviously
frustrated with the efforts and we were close to the end of glasses that could
help her. Then I remembered the glasses
that were not like the rest and the small pair.
So I went into the suitcase and got them out. The minute she tried them on she started to
smile and read from the tract to her teacher.
The next day we were at a
similar site and I was once again asked to do eyeglasses that day. Things were pretty much the same with my
being outside of the building all the other medical services were being
conducted in. We still had a good many
eyeglasses left and people were coming for just eyeglasses this time and not
for other medical services so I had a larger crowd than I did the first
day. About 10 in the morning with 12
people all trying glasses on at the same time I could see the nurses who were
working the pharmacy directing a man my way.
As he came over I noticed a scar across one side of his face and across
the eye. When he opened the eye it was
milky white. It turned out he had been
kicked by a mule or donkey when he was young across the face and it had damaged
his eye so he could no longer see out of it.
After assessing what he needed from glasses and looking at the pair he
already owned, it was clear he needed a stronger prescription to see in the
distance. I was about to start with the
pairs on the blanket when I remembered what had happened the day before. So I went to my box of odd pairs of glasses
and brought out the pair that had different prescriptions for each eye. I never checked to see if the prescription
was right for the eye I just handed them to him. He put them on and after a second to adjust
he started to smile. I had him identify
the pictures I had put up fence posts about 15 feet away and he told me he
could see them clearly.
The next to last day of
medical services I was actually in a room as the school we were in was much
larger. I had set up the glasses on
several tables, but by now some of the prescription stickers had come off or
were unreadable due to the number of people handling the glasses. Toward the end of my day a gentleman led an
elderly lady into the room. While I am
not medically trained I could see a good bit of cloudiness in her eyes most
likely from cataracts. Unfortunately my
Spanish was not strong enough to try and convince her that glasses would not do
as much as surgery and also knowing that the type of surgery would be difficult
for her to get living in a small farming village in the mountain jungles far
removed from the cities. While waiting
on an interpreter, I tried some glasses out on her so that we were at least
trying to help. I decided to try on the
pair of glasses that were so thick I was afraid they may topple her over from
the weight. She put them on and nothing
happened and I chalked it up to a good try.
Then she turned her head and looked at the man leading her and she
smiled and cried, cried and smiled. The
man was her son and she had not been able to see his face for over a year. We still had the doctor’s talk with her about
possible surgery and the local contact was to follow up with trying to help her
to that end.
This was my first time to
truly feel I had been in the presence of a miracle. God knew I was stubborn or dense and felt
three for three would be the only way I would recognize it. He was of course right, I would have
discounted one or possibly two times as luck but after the third it had to be
something else. Something with a bigger
purpose in mind.
Most know I finished that
trip up giving away my own glasses after standing in a kitchen area so hot that
I went through two gallons of water and was standing in a puddle of my own
sweat. Because the glasses no longer had
any stickers I just had people come in the small kitchen area and in groups of
5 and we put one pair of glasses on the first person and they would pass them
down the line until somebody found a match.
My vision difficulty was mostly from a military injury and to help my
eyes focus together for depth perception.
So without my glasses I was ok up close.
As I took my glasses off to wipe the sweat from my brow every few
seconds, I managed to hand them off to the line of people and did not notice I
was without them until I left the room and had to focus on something more than
4 feet away. By that time they were
gone, so I just smiled and was glad someone could see well.
Tanzania 2015
I have been blessed by a
good friend at home who wanted to do something to help our ministry here in
Tanzania. On her own she started
collecting eyeglasses so we could distribute them here at our site. Her first package was over 60 pairs. Then she turned it into a Bronze Award
project for her daughter’s Girl Scout group.
There are three of them in the group that is doing the eyeglasses. They joined forces with church groups and the
confirmation class at Mauldin United Methodist and collected over 600 pairs of
glasses and after asking for donations to help with shipping they sent them
over. When I got the box the first thing
I thought of is that we would have these glasses for over a year giving them
out unless we started to do more outreach with them.
Then a week later we got
the truck and we started doing exactly that.
The first week the truck was on site we visited a location about 45
minutes by vehicle and gave out 133 pairs of glasses to people who just heard
we were doing it and showed up.
The next week we visited
four different locations and gave away all the rest of our glasses. Yes you read that correctly we gave away over
600 pairs of glasses in two weeks just by doing an outreach using our truck.
The last day of glass
distributions we went to a primary school on the outskirts of the East Iramba
Valley district. We met with the
teachers and support staff as they worked in and out of classes and made sure
everyone who needed glasses got a pair.
We used what is called the smile method where you try on glasses until
you get a smile because you can see what you were missing. No it is not the most scientific of methods
and probably not even medically correct but it is what we have.
After that we went to
Igunoguno to distribute glasses but we had so few left it was a short
visit. We thought of putting it off
until we got more glasses but decided it best to follow through since we had to
stop there anyway to let out some folks from the valley riding with us. There was an older gentlemen who could not
talk being assisted to our area with some help.
I am not sure what had taken his voice but they told me it had been
years. He did not know sign language and
had a great deal of difficulty seeing things at a distance. He tried on six pairs of glasses but only
because I asked him to try more on to be sure he was happy with the first
pair. In truth I knew when he put the
first pair on it was a match. Why? Because of his smile. It was a smile that reminded me of those
three odd pairs of glasses from the trip to Panama.
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| The gentleman on the left is the one mentioned in the paragraph above. |
Never discount the power
of a smile, they often leave a lasting
memory on others.
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