new job career: translator

Last week I spent four days volunteering as a translator with Vision Health International (VHI), a US NGO that came over with a team of medical staff that provided free eye surgeries, exams, glasses and consultations in Piura. My friend, Tom, did it last year and he claims it made him very certain that he wanted to pursue a medical career. I haven’t changed my life’s dreams all of a sudden (although I was repeatedly called "doctora"), but it was by far a spectacular experience. As Tom put it, we spend two years working on projects whose results we may never see; development initiatives generally take a long time to create change. While that type of work is greatly needed and has its own merits, it gives you a more intense fuzzy feeling to see immediate results when you help change someone’s life. One day a man can’t see, the next morning he marvels that he can distinguish people’s faces around him...or that lady´s beautiful green eyes, as one old man put it. Most mornings I explained to patients how to take care of their eyes post-surgery and then went on to translate at eyeglass fittings. One morning I interviewed patients for their eye histories, which meant I chatted with the Peruvians coming in and offer them an attentive ear, which is my favorite job. Another morning I translated during consultations, which again let me hear their stories. Their stories were very telling of their lives: a construction worker was hammering and a piece of cement flew into his eye, another man was scaling a fish and the scale that got stuck in his eye gave him a cataract. Some stories were just weird: one man claims that he had been sleeping with his eye resting on the backside of his wrist and when he woke up, he tore his eye (in his words, “detached”) although the optometrist later told me she thought it was due to another cause he didn’t realize. It was extremely rewarding not only seeing post-operative patients on their first morning being able to see as well as the grateful faces of their loved ones, it was also unexpectedly rewarding to help people find eyeglasses, since in some cases it had the same effect. One shy adolescent teenager with an obvious low self-esteem problem had such bad vision, her mother said she would constantly fall as she walked around because she couldn’t see the holes in the ground, and she would get lost. Imagine how much more confident she must feel now that she won´t trip all the time. Some people just wanted to be able to read the Bible or the newspaper, or leave the house confident they wouldn’t get lost or run over. Kids wanted to be able to read the board without getting yelled at by their teacher to sit back in their seat, and parents wanted to help their kids with their homework. It was a neat experience because this is one reason why I wanted to learn Spanish – to get to know people completely different from me and learn more about what their life is like. In the video promoting VHI, someone commented that it’s the same for the doctors who came; this is the reason why they wanted to become a doctor in the first place – to help people. So I guess we all fulfilled part of our idealistic dreams in some small way.

On a depressing note, it was really sad to tell people we couldn’t help them either because their problem was incurable or because there wasn’t enough space on the operating list for them -- which was usually the case. Many kids with strabismus, which is an eye condition where the eyeball looks to the side, did not get operated on because older people with cataracts were prioritized. The reasoning went that cataract surgeries are faster since older people don´t need full-body anesthesia, and VHI could help more patients. While this is understandable, if you look at the long-term it’s more important to help kids than people in their 70s or 80s. However, like any NGO, VHI must also be susceptible to the politics of fundraising and the subsequent need to emphasize quantity, so the question becomes a bit more complicated.

On the other hand, I spent a good 7 minutes trying to convince an old man to get cataract surgery. He was one of the many old men who came through whose hard life was written on their rough and wrinkled skin. As soon as he heard the word "surgery," he became petrified and gripped both my hands tightly and pulled my face inches away from his as he pleaded to me not to operate on him. He looked like he was about to cry. I was on the verge of tears myself since the doctor had me translate dramatic things like "this might be your only opportunity for the rest of your life to see again" and his daughter went back and forth pleading with her dad to get the surgery and then pleaded to me recounting that his friend had received surgery but it made him blind, which explains his absolute fear of scalpels. After repeating to him that these are good doctors from the United States, well-trained, who have operated on thousands of patients successfully for many years, and that if he ends up blind there won´t be a difference anyway, his pathetic pleas of "please, Srta., please, no, no surgery, please don´t do it to me" became more insistent and I felt his thumbnails digging into my fingers and he pulled me even closer to his deer-in-headlights eyes. This was so unfortunate because there were so many people we had turned away, and here is a man who just doesn´t want it and will remain blind and dependent. Anyway, it was of course his decision in the end although it made me really sad to see him go.

On a lighter note, it was also a fun week. The VHI team included some of the surgeons´ kids in the age range of 20-30 who came along to help out, so we quickly made friends with some wonderful and interesting people, and I learned a bit about spas and majoring in enology. Plus, the entire team was full of fun folks with some spunk in them. There was even a pair of friends who were former Peace Corps volunteers in Ecuador during the 80s who had completely different experiences than we did. They were completely isolated from Peace Corps and virtually the rest of the world. Prima and I chatted with them in the anesthesia room – which had Girl Scout cookies – THIN MINTS, score…oh, and that same day I got to see some eye surgery on a kid with strabismus. I have some pretty icky pictures that I will be uploading to flickr as soon as I can. It was a unique opportunity and I even unwrapped a syringe for one of the surgeons, taking care not to infect it with my germs. It made me a bit nervous, even though the task wasn’t very hard. Now I know I can stomach watching eye surgery without feeling nauseous…although that will probably be my only opportunity in life to see it. Yay random life experiences!

Anyhow, now I know a lot more about eyes and cataracts and eyeglass fittings as well as more eye vocabulary in Spanish than I ever though I’d know! Plus, it made me feel really good about my level of Spanish. However, I don´t think I´d be a good translator because I didn´t stick to the script...the doctor would say "tell him we´re sorry we can´t operate because there´s just too many people waiting and it´s not that serious" and I would say in Spanish "Your cataracts are not very serious, so that´s good. (sounding really excited) We´ll give you some glasses so you can see better. They might get worse so you might have to get surgery one day." One doctor I was translating for got frustrated because he would try to say something to a patient, which wasn’t altogether incorrect. I would say almost the same thing but with a better accent and the patient would finally understand. Which is really funny, because that’s how I felt when I first arrived in Peru. Oh, and I had my first dab into hands-on medicine. I dilated a bunch of people’s eyes. At first, I sucked at it so I had to put drops in their eyes a second time, but I think I got the hang of it.

I encourage anyone with old eyeglasses laying around to send it their way, although I´m not sure how that process works. There weren´t always enough glasses in the right prescription...and as the flickr pictures will prove, many of them are very old-fashioned and ugly. However, send the ugly ones their way, too, most people over 40 just wanted to see! And while you´re at it, send them some sunglasses!