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The success of any VOSH mission is a joint effort of the mission team, the host team and the interpreters. The
Mission Team: Dr. Irma North, clinic director for the mission, is an optometrist and had a solo contact lens practice in Chicago for 54 years. She moved to the state of Washington to be close to her daughter and family. She thinks this is her 36th mission; she started participating in missions in 1977. Irma says VOSH keeps her alert. Dr. Greg Hagedorn is an optometrist in Henderson, Kentucky. Greg is married to Deborah and has 3 grown step children (2 boys and a girl) living in Kentucky, Indiana, and Tennessee. He has been a Lions Club member for 22 years and he is president of VOSH Kentucky. He has been on 16 missions in 10 countries. 14 of these missions have been with VOSH (10 of which have been led by Bob and Shirley Merriam) and 2 with Lions in Sight. Dr. John Spencer is an optometrist in St. Paul, MN where he participates in a group practice. He and his wife have 6 children. This is his 6th VOSH mission. He likes to read and travel; he and his family love the water and particularly enjoy Lake Superior. He has “no worries” as he spent two years in New Zealand teaching and studying. Alan Carpenter retired from Travelers Ins. June 1, 2005 after 42 years then married Rebecca, a 5th grade teacher; between them they have 3 grown children and 3 grandchildren. Although he has done other missions in foreign countries (Africa, China, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Brazil) this is his first VOSH mission. Alan says the future holds a great deal of travel with 2 or 3 missions each year and VOSH will have priority. Harold Babine is retired from the U. S. Navy. He and his wife Judy live in Apopka, Fl (a suburb of Orlando). They have 3 children, 7 grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren. He is a member of Sarasota Lions Club, secretary/treasurer of VOSH Florida, and has been a force in VOSH Florida from the beginning. Though this is the first VOSH mission where he was an actual member of the team he has given countless hours in getting ready for numerous missions. One of the many things that he does is to collect the eyeglasses from the lost and found department at Disney once a month. SuEllen Brauer lives in Decatur, IL and is the doting aunt to 12 nieces and nephews. She is a retired mathematics teacher and is presently working part time as a math consultant to the Decatur Area Technical Academy. She enjoys doing all kinds of needle arts, reading, and traveling. This is SuEllen’s 4th VOSH mission; she has done other missions in Honduras (2) and Peru. Pat Dodson has been on 15 VOSH missions; she has been to Bulgaria, Belize, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Honduras, Thailand, Bolivia, Swaziland, Paraguay and others. In her work life she started out as a cosmetic chemist. She traded options on the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, and she then had a marketing company and did financial planning for women. She now enjoys the Osher Life, Long Learning Institute at Northwestern University. She says her 5 daughters still keep her busy. Judy Johnson was born into a Finnish American MN family. Married for 11 years, she single-parented 4 sons who are now an excavating contractor, a decorative hardware store owner, and a police investigator. A 4th son is disabled by mental retardation. She was a legal secretary, a human resources manager and a teacher of K-12 English (ESL) to immigrants and refugees. She student taught in Curitiba, Brazil and has been a volunteer teacher of English in Russia, Spain, and China and with adults in her home district of Wayzata, MN. Her passion for travel and people has led her to 21 countries, including participating in VOSH missions in Peru and Paraguay. Summer 2006 plans include family travel in Kenya and Tanzania. Paige Linkins, our youngest member at 25, is a native Virginian. She has known Charlie, the mission leader, all of her life as he is a family friend, which is how she got involved with VOSH. She has been on two VOSH missions, both of which were to Yeguarizo, Paraguay. Back in the states she is still trying to figure out what she wants to do. She is a graduate of Rollins College and is hoping to attend Boston University this fall in a dual master’s degree program in International Relations and Religion. Bob and Shirley Merriam live in Owensboro, KY; they have a daughter, two sons and 5 grandsons; their daughter has gone on one mission, and one of the sons and his family have been on 3 missions. Bob and Shirley have been active in VOSH since ’83. Bob says he has been on a bunch of missions in 14 countries (he thinks this is number 67) and Shirley has been on all but maybe 6 of those. He started organizing his own trips in ’94. He is a retired GE engineer and has designed battery pacs for the Retinomax used on VOSH missions so they could run all day (otherwise the Retinomax only runs about an hour). He makes these for other VOSH chapters as well and there are now 10 VOSH chapters that use them. Bob is presently working on a design with smaller batteries. In 2004 VOSH International decided to give an annual humanitarian award. Bob Merriam was the first recipient. Bob gives much credit to Shirley, who has worked untold hours with the eyeglasses at home and in the dispensing department on missions. Cliff Morris lives in Orlando, FL; he and his wife Angela have 8 children and 7 grandchildren. Cliff is a retired mathematics teacher and dean; he is a professor of mathematics at Valencia Community College, Orlando. He traveled to Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, South Africa for the first time in 2002 with People to People International, and every March since he has taught mathematics in Mitchell’s Plain Portland High School. He has been involved with VOSH since 2002 with mission trips to Brazil, Peru (2), Romania, and Hungry. Stanley Mataichi Sagara from Washington DC is an US Armed Forces veteran (101st Airborne Division, 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment and 82nd Airborne Division, 508th Prcht Infantry Rgt). He served in the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) US Air Force; after retirement he served as the Office Manager for the Chief Seattle Council, Boy Scouts of America; he was hired as a Criminal Investigator, US Civil Service, US Navy. He joined the Lions Club in 1984 and started going on Eye Care Missions with VOSH. In the past 17 years he has participated in 22 missions to various parts of the world, including Nicaragua (4), Honduras (2), Mexico (2), Guatamala (2), Paraguay (2), Ukraine (2), Russia, Bulgaria, India, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Thailand. He has a son, a daughter, and two grandsons and he still actively collects eye glasses. Martha Smith lives in Silver Springs, FL; she has 2 children and 4 grandchildren. She retired 20 years ago as a school librarian; she also spent a number of years as a mathematics teacher but is presently a realtor. This is her first VOSH mission. She says a tourist trip to Peru and a week in the Amazon in 2002 paved the way for this trip; also friends in the Silver Springs Lions Club encouraged her to go. Her son is an optometrist and went on a VOSH mission when he was in graduate school. She loves to travel! Marsha Sullivan lives in Seattle, WA; she is a mother of 3 grown children and a happy grandmother of 11 (8 boys and 3 girls). She has volunteered for previous VOSH missions in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Turkey. After a lifetime in accounting and owning four secretarial services, she changed careers five years ago to become an independent sales rep. Now she spends all of her time traveling all states north and west of Colorado (including Alaska and Hawaii) plus British Columbia Kenneth Weeks is from Gainesville, FL, and this is his second VOSH mission. After ending a long career with the Florida Power and Light Co., he is enjoying working pro-bono with several human rights organizations. He likes to travel and looks forward to other VOSH missions. He is the father of a son in Colorado and a daughter who lives in Mexico. He is also the proud grandfather of a beautiful granddaughter who lives in Colorado. The
Host Team The
Interpreters We arrived in Asuncion about midday on a Saturday after flying all night from Miami. We had time for a short nap before the city tour of Asuncion; the guide was quite knowledgeable and told us about Paraguayan history, presidents, wars, dictators, and the good period. However, jet lag had taken its toll, and the only thing I remember for sure is that 40% of the national budget is paid for from the sale of electricity, and not all paved roads are smooth. In the evening we went to Acuarela, a Brazilian restaurant, where they had a salad buffet, a desert buffet, and the waiters brought all sorts of grilled meats to the table; the meats were mainly beef, chicken, and pork. The food was delicious, and we were all stuffed. Ellie, Laura & Scott, and Roberto & Lavon Cabrera (friends of Laura & Scott) joined us for dinner. Ellie and Laura welcomed us with handmade Paraguayan gifts, earrings for the ladies and key rings for the gents. Since it was the first formal gathering of the team, each of us introduced ourselves and Charlie added a nice word or two to our introductions. We appreciated the opportunity to sleep late the next morning before we went to a great Chinese restaurant, Shangri-La, for lunch. Early Sunday afternoon we headed up to Yeguarizo to set up the clinic and be ready to start the mission on Monday. After completing the set up, there was a little ceremony with a welcome speech. Then we were entertained by 4 young ladies dancing in native costumes and by another young lady playing a harp that her father had constructed and carved. To conclude the evening, we were served a plate of typical Paraguayan food. One of the foods was a meat-filled pastry called Empanadas that we had several times after that. We enjoyed all of our meals at the clinic. For breakfast there was usually something cooked (for example eggs or French toast) and Empanadas, but there was also a variety of fruits and cold cereal available. In fact, the big tray of fruit was always on the table and available at any meal. For lunch it was usually a hearty soup and bread or maybe a sandwich and something sweet for dessert like rice pudding or bread pudding. For dinner there would be some sort of meat, a rice dish or potatoes, bread and a dessert. At lunch and dinner there were usually bowls of salad that consisted of long slender strips of lettuce and sliced tomatoes on top (only place I have been that I ate salad by spinning it on my fork like spaghetti). There was a frig that was filled with boxes of juice and bottles of water that we were free to drink at any time. Coffee and tea were also available. Everyone was quite attentive to our needs and wants. The mission was held at the Clyde E. Bay Clinic, Yeguarizo, Paraguay. Yeguarizo is a rural area about 60 miles from Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. Rural means hearing cows bawling, pigs squealing, and dogs barking at any hour; rural means being awakened by roosters crowing (unfortunately, their alarm clocks were set much earlier than we wished to be awakened); and rural means no English language newspapers available and no English speaking channels on TV. The clinic is in a fenced compound with multiple structures. The big building of the clinic is a two-story concrete structure with 5 rooms on the first floor in a “doctors suite” type arrangement. There is an outside staircase to the second floor that has 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, a kitchen, and a small dining room. At the back of the building an addition was added and was attached to the main building by a covered portico; the addition has 2 bedrooms with private baths at the back and a large room in front. The area of the bottom floor, the portico, and the large room of the addition is where we set up the clinic for the mission. Also on the grounds is a complex of rooms and apartments with covered walkways where employees and families live. Along one of these walkways a very long table was set up for meals; as the average high is 79 and the average low is 60 in September in Paraguay this outdoor eating area was very pleasant. The mission team was housed in the upstairs bedrooms and the bedrooms in the addition; the Bay family members graciously moved in with other relatives in the compound so some members could use their apartments. We brought all of the equipment and all of the glasses with us. For this mission we brought 5,000 pairs of glasses. It is always a challenge to set up the mission to be as efficient as possible without bringing extra baggage. The general path for the patient wanting glasses was to register, do the visual acuity (where numbers are used instead of letters or a chart showing fingers pointing different directions), get a reading from the Retinomax (to get an approximate reading of the prescription), see one of the doctors, get the glasses from dispensing, and lastly have them fitted. The jobs (and the people performing these jobs in parenthesis) are crowd control (Alan, Cliff, Harold, Ken), visual acuity (Paige, Alan, Pat), using the Retinomax (Bob), dispensing (Shirley, Marsha, Judy, Martha, SuEllen), and fitting the glasses (Stan, SuEllen, Ken, Cliff). Of course, our very capable doctors, Irma, John, and Greg, did the eye exams, usually 2 interpreters and Ellie ran registration, and our mission leader Charlie made sure everything ran smoothly. Pat
shared this with me about visual acuity: I
asked Greg to share with me some thoughts about the conditions of
the eyes and any particularly memorable cases. A lot of people have worked very hard to collect and organize the glasses and make decisions so we had the best chance to have the prescriptions that we needed. It is tough to tell someone that we just don’t have any glasses that will work for him or her. Sometimes it is confusing to the patient about where we get our glasses. One man whose prescription we couldn’t fill asked if we would be getting a shipment tomorrow. These are all donated glasses, so we have only what people donated; a few years ago “big” was the style; but, unfortunately, “small” is the style now. Like people all over the world, the Paraguayans want to be fashionable. Not only the young people but also the older folks were begging for small glasses. Ellie explained what was behind some of this. It seems there is a soap opera on TV that has this stupid guy who wears big glasses and no one wants to look like him. It became an inside joke with the mission team that one can see better with small glasses. We registered about 2100 people; of these 2100, about 425 didn’t need glasses and there were 85 referrals. It is difficult to know how many pairs of glasses we gave out as many times when we couldn’t fill a bifocal prescription with a pair of bifocals we gave one pair of glasses for distance and another pair of glasses for reading. This
is Charlie’s reply when I asked him if all the referrals were
for cataracts, to whom were they referred and what do you think
will happen with these When
you come on a VOSH mission, there are many personal experiences.
These are Judy’s experiences. Going
on a VOSH mission is one of giving and receiving. Marsha shared
her thoughts: Besides the smiles, hugs, and kisses of the people with their new glasses we were thanked in many ways. Alejo Fretes, mayor of Acahay (mayor of the closest incorporated town) brought his family to the mission and invited us to a barbeque the next day; he provided the meat and the beer. Lilian Villalba, director of Escuela Gregorio Romon Cardosa No. 463 (a school) brought two students to serenade us at lunch the last day we were at the clinic as a thank you for giving glasses to her students. One of the students was the young lady who had entertained us the first afternoon on the harp, and the other was a young man who played the guitar and sang. A representative of the local Lions Club came to thank us; he gave each of us a small gift and presented a plaque to Charlie as representative of VOSH Florida and a plaque to Ellie. I think this was particularly meaningful to those of our members who are Lions Clubs members but appreciated by the rest of us as well because the people instrumental in starting VOSH Florida were each members of a Lions Club. After completing the VOSH mission Friday at noon, we headed back to Asuncion after lunch and the next day flew to Buenos Aires, Argentina for R and R. While we were in Buenos Aires, we stayed at the Lancaster Hotel, a European style hotel with beautiful wood floors. It is located 2 blocks from the pedestrian shopping street Florida and also close to a big shopping mall where the stores and merchandise looked pretty much like what we saw at home. Of the numerous shops there were many shops for sweaters and jewelry: we were offered many opportunities to have leather goods made. Judging by the bags the VOSH team carried in I would say we did our part for Argentina’s economy. Many restaurants that offered a variety of food and drink were located close to our hotel. We all agreed that the steaks were particularly good. In Buenos Aires we had a city tour. Again we had a guide who was very knowledgeable and told us many things about the city and Argentinean history, but this time I didn’t have jet lag as an excuse for not remembering details. I did enjoy visiting the Cathedral, which was not lavishly ornate but had nice architecture and was very attractive. One memorable experience of Argentina was the evening of Tango lessons and going to a Milonga. A Milonga is where one goes to dance the Tango. At 9 pm we were given an hour of Tango lessons in a dance studio by two professional dance teachers. Besides teaching us what the feet should be doing, they talked about the etiquette and rules of the dance floor at the Milonga, especially the eye contact and nod of the head to indicate how a man invites a woman to dance. After the dance lessons we went for dinner at the typical Argentinean dinnertime of after 10 pm and then went to a Milonga. A few brave souls in our group ventured out to the dance floor, but many of us enjoyed sitting and watching the locals dance Tango. The rest of the time in Argentina some of the group were still practicing “the nod”. One day we took a tour to Montevideo, Uruguay, which included a 3-hour ferry ride, lunch at a local restaurant, a tour of the city, and another 3-hour ferry ride. This was a Sunday; so many stores were not open. However the first stop of the bus was at a square, which did indeed have a souvenir shop that was open, and the last stop of the day was the shopping mall. As this was a brisk windy day, we also did our part for Uruguay’s economy since many people bought leather hats with fuzzy wool lining at the souvenir shop. The highlight of this trip for me was the visit to the Naval Museum. Stan knew about this museum, and it was arranged for those interested to be dropped off there. All of the writing was in Spanish, but Stan (a retired army man), Harold (a retired navy man), and a young man who didn’t speak English but could still communicate to get his point across explained things to the rest of us. This was a long day as we left at 6:30 am and didn’t return until about 10:30 pm. We took a trip to the Island Tigre our last full day in Buenos Aires. We boarded a train that took us through the residential neighborhoods of the northern suburbs; we got off at San Isidro where we visited the cathedral, then returned to the train to see the rest of the suburbs; at the end of the of the line our bus picked us up and took us to the docks. We cruised along the Delta enjoying the scenery to the Island Tigre where we enjoyed a nice lunch at Gato Blanco Restaurante, then returned home (after a while one begins to think of the hotel as home) by boat and bus. The next day it was time to head to the US. The mission is over, but every morning when I put on my glasses, I think of all of the people in Paraguay who now are able to do the same thing because VOSH Florida has sent 3 missions to Yegaurizo, Paraguay. When I sew or read, I think of all of the people in Paraguay who are now able to do the same thing because people like Charlie our mission leader are willing to put in the countless hours it takes to organize a mission. When I see children with glasses, I think of the children in Paraguay who will do better in school because of all the volunteers who are willing to spend their time and money to participate in these missions. It is a good feeling.
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