Honduras, Day 2 – Don’t Flush That

Today (Saturday) was the first day of our eye care clinic. It works like this: people come to the Lions Club building in town, where there is a dental clinic and an eye clinic. A Lions member registers each person as they come to clinic and gives them a ticket, telling them what day to come back. This is so that they don’t spend day after day waiting in line. The first stop in the clinic is a basic acuity test – the patient covers each eye and does a simplified version of the vision chart you see at the optometrist’s office. The one with the big E at the top. The chart I tried to memorize when I was younger so that my vision didn’t seem so bad. Our charts have numbers and pictures on them because some of our clients don’t know how to read, so a chart with letters would be useless.

After that, the adult patients go to a glaucoma test. When that’s done, everyone goes to a station where they sit down and put their face in that machine where the technician shines a light into your eyes to look at the shape of your corneas. At least, I think that’s what it does. I should know, after going to the eye doctor so often throughout my life, but I didn’t ask.

We have five optometrists on our team who see the patients after the preliminary tests. They assess the patients’ vision more carefully and provide eye drops and glaucoma treatment drops to those who need them. They write the prescriptions for glasses for those who need them, and for the special cases like terygium (they tell me it’s like a callus on the eye) or sores or diseases, they write medical referrals to the Lions Club clinic in San Pedro Sula, which does surgeries and more advanced treatments.

The patients that need glasses then come to the dispensary, where we have approximately 1,500 pairs of donated glasses, sunglasses, and reading glasses. I worked pretty much all day in the dispensary with the team members that pull glasses, adjust glasses, and cut lenses. The doctors had bilingual students to help them speak to clients, so I stayed in the dispensary to talk to patients about taking care of their glasses, how important it is to use sunglasses when they’re outside, and when they should come back to pick up custom-made glasses.

That’s the basics. It was kind of a whirlwind day. When I closed my eyes at the end of the day, I saw patients’ faces and heard lots of Spanish in my head. For most of the day, I was able to speak the right language to the right person (Spanish to a patient, English to a team member, etc.). But by the end of the day, I was speaking Spanish to everyone. I was helping my Aunt Penny communicate with a woman selling shawls and scarves after the clinic closed and at one point, she asked me what the scarf was made out of, the woman said “algodón” (cotton), and I turned to Aunt Penny and said, “Algodón.” She just stared at me, with a little Auntie Penny smile on her face, and waited for me to realize that I hadn’t spoken English.

I had never had that happen before. Even at the end of five months in Spain, my default was always English. I always had to think before speaking to Spanish-speakers because my thoughts were in English. But after just one day here, where I probably did more speaking than in 3 or 4 days in Spain, I was speaking Spanish first. At the welcome dinner at the home of the Lions Club president, I was finding it harder to form English sentences than Spanish ones. Crazy, huh?

Here’s a fun fact (and those of you who have spent time in Central America will recognize this one): you don’t flush your toilet paper here. You use it, then put it in the trash can next to the toilet. This took a little getting used to. I have flushed paper only twice since arriving because sometimes it’s so automatic to just drop the paper in the toilet and flush it. You may ask, doesn’t it get stinky? Surprisingly, not too bad! And they change the trash often. Every bathroom that I’ve been in so far (except the one in the airport) has a window to the outside, which helps a lot. Plus, they maintain the bathrooms more often here – I saw a sign in the airport indicating that theirs would be “refreshed” approximately every four hours. Maybe all they do is Febreeze it, but whatever. It helps. The bathrooms here are no stinkier than the public bathrooms in the U.S.

Today (Sunday) is church day and markets day. We’ll start the clinic a little bit later than normal to accommodate those who want to attend church and those who want to do some shopping in the Sunday market. Then, it’s business as usual! Thank you for your prayers and thoughts. We’ve had a very successful first clinic day. And, yes, my suitcase arrived yesterday afternoon, so I have clean clothes again! Stay tuned for more fun stories and maybe some pictures. I haven’t yet had time to organize and upload them. ¡Hasta mañana!