Eye doctors in the rainforest

Five-year-old Marianito watches the heavy plane rumble over the crowded slums and high-rise hotels of Guatemala City to the airport wedged inside this city of 3 million people. His eyes light up as he throws his arms around the tall, wiry man with curly hair, wondering if there’s a gift inside his backpack and looking past him to see if Anthony has come too.

“No, not this time, buddy,” says eye doctor Doug Villella, whose son, the same age as Marianito, stayed home with his mom, Holly, and sister Amanda.

Soon Marianito’s father and uncle, opthalmologists Mariano and Nicholas Yee, will board a smaller plane with Doug, their duffle bags stuffed with medical supplies, several bulging containers of eye glasses and equipment waiting on the tarmac. They will go deep into the rainforest of the Petén, where they and a small group of volunteers from VOSH/PA, the Pennsylvania chapter of Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity, will see 3,700 people in five days, some who have walked six hours just to stand in line. For 36 years a violent civil war, which ended in 1996, drove many families to the remote regions of the Petén where there is a measure of safety, but no access to medical care. They say he can move mountains, but he will climb them, too, if it will bring him one step closer to helping blind children see in the rainforest of Guatemala.

For the past 10 years, Doug Villella, an eye doctor in Erie, Pa., has worked with a team of Guatemalan doctors to energize a core group of volunteers, commandeer equipment and supplies, establish strategic partnerships around the globe, and raise $2.3 million to build three, sustainable eye-clinics for the rural poor in Guatemala. Today the clinics, which now employ five opthalmologists, including one who specializes in pediatrics, two optometrists, and dozens of health care workers, see 50,000 patients and perform 3,000 cataract surgeries every year. Together they provide more than 50 percent of all the eye care in Guatemala in what has become a demonstration project for all of Latin America.

Talk about dreaming big? This local doctor hopes to eliminate childhood blindness in Guatemala by the year 2012. And he’s already talking about expanding the program to Haiti.

Since 1997, VOSH/PA with its team of volunteer eye care professionals and others, has conducted 21 mission trips to Guatemala, examined more than 235,000 patients, dispensed 160,000 pair of eyeglasses, and provided for 16,455 sight-saving surgeries.  Guatemalans have been trained to continue vision screenings.

“By empowering local eye care specialists in developing countries, by building sustainable eye clinics, and by establishing partnerships with like-minded organizations, you can transform the third world,” says Doug, who has generated much of his support from the Erie region.

The Erie and Meadville, Pa., Lions Clubs, Erie Rotary, other local eye doctors and dozens of Erie area people have contributed time, talent and money to the project.  Grace Ward, a 104-year-old woman from Erie, is the program’s single largest benefactor.  With investment capital from other project partners, Guatemalan women have started their own micro-businesses to supply low-cost eyeglasses to their neighbors in need.

The Guatemala project earned a national People First Award from VSP in 2005, and the Humanitarian of the Year Award from VOSH International in 2006. The numbers are impressive, and the awards are, too, but the story is best told through the people whose lives are forever changed by the gift of sight.

A spectacled 12-year-old, Oswal Donis, sits at a computer in his humble cement-block home six months after surgeons removed shards lodged in his eye from a bottle rocket accident. A hard lesson learned after playing with fireworks, but now, his mom boasts, he is first in his class. He says he wants to be a teacher in the village school.

A handsome man with wavy gray hair breaks into a huge smile when his bandages are removed, a few days after cataract surgery. His wife is more beautiful than he imagined. After 20 years of marriage, he is seeing her for the first time.

Rufino Garcia straightens his new prescription bifocals and gathers up his five children, all clad in protective sunglasses and ball caps. Soon he will be sorting through barrels of dried corn, saving the best kernels for the flour he will grind for tortillas. Like most of Guatemala’s rural poor, he is a subsistence farmer. He depends on good eyesight to eat. Maximinos Zacharias, 78, a Guatemalan refuge from the nation’s 40-year civil war, at his family’s tienda, a modest store he started with his life savings. Maximinos was blind in both eyes until he had a sight-restoring corneal transplant in one eye and cataract surgery on the other.
Betya, age 10, was completely blind in both eyes and couldn’t attend school until her she had bilateral cataract surgery at the clinic in San Benito.

“Children are especially vulnerable,” says Doug. “They get their first machete by the age of 7, they work long hours unprotected in the hot sun, and many of them they suffer from conditions they were born with, like congenital glaucoma and congenital cataracts.” Without the benefit of early intervention and surgery, these conditions go untreated, says Doug. “Some of the people with cataracts reach adulthood without ever knowing that their blindness can be treated with surgery.”

Now that the clinics are self-sufficient, Doug and his team are working to establish a $2.5 million endowment that will ensure the project continues long after they hand over the keys.  An estimated 4,000 children still need surgical care, and thousands more need prescription eyeglasses.

This month Doug is focusing on “The Mount Kilimanjaro Climb for Sight,” a challenging, 11-day trip to the top of the highest, freestanding mountain in the world. Held every year in August and January, the event funds eye surgeries for children in Guatemala and could hold the key to the permanent endowment that will keep the clinics running, long into the future.

“These climbers are realizing a lifetime dream to summit Mount Kilimanjaro and in doing so they are opening a door for the children in Guatemala to realize their dream for sight,” says Doug. “By securing sponsorships and fundraising for kids, you do two wonderful things at once -- you get a full African experience climbing a mountain and a safari, and you carry 30 to 40 children to the top of the mountain with you.”

Mount Kilimanjaro Climb for Sight
Adventure seekers can read more about The Mount Kilimanjaro Climb for Sight, founded in 2000 by Chuck, “Lucky” Patton, in ads placed in this month’s issues of National Geographic Adventure, Backpacker and Outside magazines. The next climb will be named in honor of Patton, who died of cancer in 2006. So far the climb has contributed $205,000 to fund sight-saving surgeries for 1,000 children.

Read more about the Guatemala project at www.voshpa.org

“I’ve learned that something like this needs a driver. No matter what the obstacle, you drive around it. Now we have a committed team of humanitarian doctors down there, the facilities are in place, and everyone is empowered. There is no possibility of it failing.”
Doug Villella, O.D.
President of VOSH/PA

Gather travel correspondent Lisa Gensheimer, Rich Gensheimer, and Mike Sparks are presently at work on a multi-media project that documents this collaborative effort among many international organizations.

This story, with photos by Mike Sparks, is adapted from a story by Lisa Gensheimer which first appeared in the August, 2007 issue of Her Times, a publication of the Erie Times-News. It is posted here with permission.
© 2007 Erie Times-News