Long Days, Fancy Lunches: Clinic Days in Guatemala

For four clinic days we worked in Guatemala under grueling conditions, but for reasons I'll describe a little later, we loved it. Each work day started at around 8am, when the first patient walked over to Dan to get his or her visual acuity measured. And Jan or Alba or Leslie helped the 500th patient pick out glasses at 7pm, the end of our day. That's not a typo- each day, 500 people passed through the Lions Club doors to have their eyes checked!

For sure, we brought a wonderful team with us- four optometrists, one surgeon, a surgical assistant, and six folks who made it happen in the pre-testing and eyeglass fitting and dispensing departments. Our team ran like a well-oiled machine, to get people through as efficiently as possible.

But our local hosts, the Lions Club members of Xela and Salcaja, provided the grease. Whenever it got too stuffy in the dark cubby that was our exam room, water magically appeared at the work stations and a fan was rigged up to help circulate the air. If someone in our group felt a little tired, one of the volunteers would run to make fresh coffee or grab a soda, for a little pick-me-up.

One day I suddenly got so hungry I didn't think I could go on....and when I turned around there was a fresh fruit smoothie being offered to me on a platter. No kidding. Somehow they knew exactly what I wanted, even before I did.

These Lions were veteran volunteers. They did whatever it took to keep us at our stations, seeing as many patients in that eleven hour day as was humanly possible. So while we worked like dogs in clinic, we were also treated like kings.


Lions Club headquarters:


The calm before the storm:



Getting some help with a translation:


Cover your left eye, please:


Scoping things out:


Joking around:



Consulting the surgeon:


Trying out new glasses:


Brushing up on Spanish:


Thank goodness for translators:


Our wonderful Lions hosts:


Happy campers:


No matter how busy we were in clinic, the Lions insisted we take time out mid-afternoon each day, for a formal sit-down lunch. We tried to hint that it might be better to work through lunch and then get out at a reasonable time, say sometime before dinner, but our hosts wouldn't hear of it. They were hell-bent on treating us like honored guests. So each day we sat down to a delicious gourmet lunch served up by our personal chef, Lucky, and her helpers. Sometimes it's good to be king.