Evangelina’s new vision

Evangelina Carrezosa is 76 years old. She has eight children, 20 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. She has lived in rural Huatabampo, in Mexico’s Sonora state, for 30 years. She has never seen an eye doctor—until today.

Today, the Kiwanis Club of Klamath Falls, Oregon, and Kiwanis Club of Navojoa, Mexico, and a host of volunteers from near, far, and in between, have set up an optometry clinic.

“A friend told me about the clinic, and I came with her,” she says through an interpreter.

Evangelina’s journey through the Kiwanis optometry clinic begins at 6 a.m., when she awakes and walks to the clinic site, an elementary school. At 8 a.m., workers from Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (DIF), a government social services agency, register her and hand her a slip of paper. She sits down to wait.

A bus pulls up at 10 a.m., and Kiwanians and other volunteers spill out. Within an hour, they have established stations throughout the school grounds, and patients begin moving through the clinic.

It’s noon when Evangelina’s turn comes, and she is guided into the first station: visual acuity. A translator instructs her to cover one eye and read the smallest line possible on the chart. Another woman, about Evangelina’s age, cannot read and is taken to a chart with shapes to name instead. Volunteers make a note on Evangelina’s paper, and she is escorted to the next station’s line.

Soon, she is taken into the room where Klamath Falls Kiwanian Bob Tucker runs an autorefractor, a special device that will read her eyes and assist in an accurate diagnosis of her prescription needs. She does not care that Bob is a Kiwanian and the machine he uses is a Rotary donation. She cares only that Bob is careful and that the machine does not hurt. After making a few calculated beeps, the autorefractor spits out an analysis, which Bob staples to her paper.

In the next station, she meets her first optometrist, Greg Moloney of Ottawa, Ontario. It is dark and cool in the converted classroom. The doctor asks her questions through a translator, an English teacher from Navojoa. He places a foreopter before her eyes and asks which lenses give better clarity. He shines a light into her eyes. He asks more questions. He writes an eyeglass prescription on Evangelina’s paper and tells her bifocals will help her.

Her last wait is outside the school’s biblioteca. Inside, among the library’s computers, volunteers scurry and search for prescriptions as Evangelina and her friend rest on metal folding chairs. She is summoned inside where Klamath Falls Kiwanian Annette Brieske takes her paper. It takes time to find a good match, because, like most prescriptions, each eye requires a different strength. And, since there is no on-site lab, Annette must sift through boxes of glasses, hoping to find something that will help Evangelina.

Annette returns—with a pair of glasses and a translator. She explains to Evangelina how the glasses work: She must look through the top portion to see distant objects and through the bottom portion when she is reading or sewing. Annette explains it will take time to get used to the new glasses, and she helps Evangelina place them before her eyes.

Finally, Evangelina looks through her new lenses, and, for the first time in many years, she sees the world clearly.

“I’m happy,” she says. “Now, I can read to my grandchildren.”

To find out more about the Klamath Falls-Navojoa Kiwanis optometry clinic, read the October 2005 issue of Kiwanis magazine.