Here is Lesbia's recipe for baked oatmeal. It is kind of like a cake, but it is really good in a bowl with some milk and bananas. She wrote it for me on Saturday morning, and I translated it for everyone -- there has been some talk about including it in the St. John cookbook.
Baked Oatmeal
3 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
1 cup sugar
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
3 cups oatmeal
2 T cinnamon
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Mix all liquid ingredients (eggs, milk, oil.)
Add the rest of the ingredients. Place the mix in a baking pan (9" by 13") and bake for 30-40 minutes.
Well, this morning is our final morning in Matagalpa, and the Rooster did not disappoint. In fact, he was up earlier than ever. I first heard him at 3:58 am, and I have not been back to sleep since. I finally gave up around 5:15 and got in the shower.
I laid in bed thinking a lot about Oliver and Perla ("Pearl" in English). They are the little children Mary Ann blogged about last night. I am still processing that experience...and really the whole week in general. But these two little ones got to all of us yesterday.
Oliver came in with his mother, Sonia, and she first sat down with me to be screened for reading glasses after she passed her distance exam. Ryan said he thought the little boy was blind, but maybe we could have Gary take a look after Sonia was done. Sonia did in fact need a pair of reading glasses. While I worked with her, I asked her about Oliver. She said that he had been born that way, and he could not see at all. The saddest part: she had two year old daughter, Pearl, at home with the same condition. I took one of our "registration slips" and filled it out with Oliver´s name and age, and Ryan and I walked them over to sit down with Gary. Sonia also shared with Alex (who pinch-hit for Luanne and interpreted for Gary yesterday, thanks Alex!) that Oliver had in fact had eye surgery in the past. Gary had a hard time getting a reading on Oliver´s eyes. He wasn´t entirely sure, I don´t think, what they had done to his eyes.
Gary asked Sonia about Pearl, and she said she was outside, so he asked her to bring her in. Pearl was a little peanut and like Oliver, looked younger than she is. As Mary Ann said, when he looked in Pearl´s eyes, her corneas were so cloudy and very blue. As Alex told Sonia that there was little we could do, and asked her to bring in the paperwork from Oliver´s surgery, Sonia got tears in her eyes. I couldn´t even imagine. She is 29, so almost exactly my age, and here she is with two children, 9 and 2, that cannot see. Pearl was grasping at her mother´s breast, trying to nurse. I am sure that since she cannot see, this still brings her a great deal of comfort.
Sonia returned later in the day with the surgery paperwork. I am not sure that it really helped provide much more information, but Omar said that there is a possibility of help being provided to them, and he took her outside to talk to her some more.
I wonder, what is next for Sonia, Oliver, and Pearl? I read these stories in People Magazine or see them on the news about Americans who bring children from other countries to the US so they can recieve medical care for serious problem. I wonder, is this a good idea? If, say, we were able to bring this family to the US for treatment, how would that go? How would we teach them about our way of life, our conveniences? Then how would we send them back home? Is the end result worth it? Would that be fair to them? I would think yes, but I would also think maybe no. I suppose the best home for them is that the government here can provide some kind of care, or maybe eventually medical treatment, that could help these children see. I doubt they get to recieve much education since they probably cannot attend a regular school. I doubt Sonia recieves any help. I am sure she cannot leave them alone, and that must wear on her greatly.
Finally, I worry, what if they have more children? What kind of burden will this put on her? Gary said it is very likely that this was caused by some sort of STD or toxoplasmosis, but we will never really know. Either way, it sounds like Sonia and her husband should not have anymore children. But how does she know that?
Before Sonia left, I hugged her with tears in my eyes, too, and I told her she was a good mother, and that this was not her fault. I hope she knows that. But I imagine that must haunt her every day, even though she does not know what caused it.
I don´t mean to leave such a sad post, but this is what we´ve seen, where we have been. It was a good day, Friday. And I think that we will all remember Oliver and Pearl. And we pray for you and your dear Mama.
Well, as you can see, the rooster was back at it again this morning. I slept less last night than any other night so far. My earplugs fell out and there was no going back to sleep. We came to breakfast and found out that Luanne had been up all night sick. She was so sick that she could not go with us to our location today. And for those of you who don´t know Luanne, she is a very tough cookie and would have to be seriously not feeling well to stay behind. After I posted my rooster song, she told me that we would need to give the rooster amnesty and put him in the rooster protection program because it was only the crowing of the rooster that gave her hope that her long night would soon be over. So, ok, fine. No roosters will be harmed during the remainder of this trip.
Today we headed out to Waswali. While this week has gone by so quickly and without incident, I must say that I´m glad to know that I will not be auto-refracting people´s eyes tomorrow. We set up in their school and were all basically in the same room again. I don´t know why this seems to work better, but it does. The people here seemed more relaxed and their children more polite. We gave out 250 tickets and saw them all by about 2:30. For our last day it seemed like we finally completely got it together. It´s nice to go out on such a positive note. We had a different bus with a different bus driver since Carlos and the two Rafaels were in Managua picking up the next team from the airport. We had two new translators, Pedro and Roger. Lunch was one of my favorites from last time, a chicken stew with local vegetables including the most delicious chayote squash.
We had a sad case where a mother brought her 9 year old son and 2 year old daughter, both of whom had been blind from birth. The boy, Olivier, had had a cataract surgery on his left eye but it did not help. You could tell that their eyes and other facial features had not formed properly in utero. Gary said that the boy appeared to have been born without a lens but that the girl´s corneas were so cloudy that he could not tell what was behind them. Corneal transplants may help her depending on what the rest of her eye looks like. Unfortunately, we could not do anything to help either of them today. If a surgical eye team comes in the future, they might be able to do something. The mother´s eyes teared up when we told her we weren´t sure if anything could be done. This caused my eyes to tear up a little bit and Katherine´s too. It´s hard enough to have some physical impairment in the United States. In this country with so few resources, I can´t imagine what the future holds for these children.
For our final devotional, we sat in our usual circle and went over logistics for tomorrow first. Before we started, Stephanie had me get a stool from our room and said that no one should sit on it. This immediately made me suspicious that we were going to do an activity that would be awkward for me. I was right to be suspicious. Our instructions were that one person would sit on the stool and the rest of us would go around the circle and tell them one reason we were thankful for them or one way they had been a blessing to us. I´m not sure which was harder: sitting on the stool or speaking in front of everyone. Steph said that it was an exercise in giving and receiving, that sometimes it is harder to receive. Whew! It took a lot of energy not to cry and then to recover enough from sitting on the stool to be able to speak again. There were some tears from more than one of us, so it´s good to know that I´m not the only blubberer. Shirley said that you get more emotional as you get older. If that´s the case, Beth and I are in big trouble. While this was quite far outside of my comfort zone, I secretly loved it. It was great to hear all the nice things everyone had to say about each other. We had a really good team dynamic even before we got to know each other better. We all grew to like each other even more over the course of the week and as I´m sure many of you could attest to, that´s not always the case when travelling with a large group.
Georgia asked me to pass along this bit of good news: ¨Today we had the Ritz Carlton of outhouses!¨
Tomorrow we head first to a place called Masaya which is a national park with an active volcano and then to Managua to our FANCY HOTEL! THE ONE WITH THE HIGH-FLOW, HOT SHOWERS!
Just to clarify, the little children and elderly ladies love Ryan. He is not 'working it', but his openness and smile welcome all.
(For those of you interested in logistics, I am copying this post from my middle-school blog. If it seems like it's written for a younger audience, that's because it is... just thought some of you might like an explanation of exactly what we are doing.)
There are 17 of us in the group, and only one person is an optometrist. Only 3 of the 17 are Spanish-speakers. So how does it work? How do all of us work together to help 250 people get their eyes checked in one day? Here's a breakdown.
1. When we arrive in a community, people are already lined up waiting to see us. Leaders in those communities have helped spread the word ahead of time and to create a system for who will be seen first. Yesterday, the community leaders had made sure that the elderly people with the worst vision were in the front of the line so that they wouldn’t have to wait so long. The Nicaraguan people who have worked with us to make this happen have done a wonderful job. We definitely could not do this without their leadership.
2. The people in line are given a “ticket” with a number. They also fill it out with their name and age. Many of the people, especially the older people, have never had the opportunity to go to school, and some of them do not know how to read and write. One of the team members who speaks Spanish or one of our Nicaraguan leaders usually fills out the paper so that will be easier.
3. When a person e
nters the clinic, we test their long-distance vision. The person stands behind the line and looks at the eye chart on the wall. Since many of them don’t know the alphabet, we use the eye chart that has an E pointing in different directions. Shirley and Georgia point at the chart, and the person tells us which direction the E is pointing. If their distance vision is okay but they are over 20 years old, we send them to another area to see if they need reading glasses (see the pictures at the bottom of the post.) If they do, they get reading glasses and sunglasses.
4. If the distance vision is not good, one of us takes the person to see Mary Ann, one of our team members who knows how to operate a machine called the auto-refractor. Mary Ann asks the people to look into the light and not to move their heads. She is able to get a reading from that machine that helps the optometrist decide what kind of glasses the person needs. Mary Anne has learned to communicate very well with a few words and phrases.
5. Next, the person sees Gary, our optometrist. He uses his instruments to look at the person’s eyes and decide what kind of glasses might help. Gary does not speak Spanish at all, so LuAnn works with him to translate.
6. We ask the person to wait while we find his or her glasses. To me, this is the hardest p
art. We have lots and lots of glasses with us. They were donated by people in the United States when they got new glasses. These are used glasses, the Lion’s Club collects them and sorts them by prescription. Allen and Charles are very organized people and understand how the glasses are sorted. I do NOT understand it. They look through the boxes and somehow pull out a pair or two of glasses that are close to the prescription we need.
7. Next is the glasses fitting. Letha, who is a nurse in our group, is very good at this. She takes the glasses to the person and tests them for close-up vision (for reading) and then sends them to Katherine to test their distance vision. Many of these people have never worn glasses before, so it is hard for them to get used to it. Lots of the prescriptions are for bifocals, and we have to explain how to use them.
8. If the glasses don’t work, we try to find something better. If they do work, the person gets a pair of sunglasses also, and he or she is ready to go! One thing that is very sad to me is that even the people who need the glasses the most often will not wear them out of the clinic. They are afraid that they will be damaged or broken, so they put them safely in the case to protect them. I hope they will wear the glasses later, because they do need them.
Kelly and Claire checking close-up vision
As I listened to the rooster crow his little heart out in the very dark, early morning hours, this song came to me:
(To the tune of Psalm 139 by Allen Pote, which we sang with the youth choir a few weeks ago)
Rooster, your crowing - it bothers me.
It awakens me from sleep!
When I rise (when I rise), or lie down (or lie down),
you are there making a peep.
Before the sun is in the sky,
you cock-a-doodle-doo!
I must admit
I want to harm you.
Where can I flee from your crowing?
Where can I go to get some sleep?
If I put in earplugs,
Or take a pill,
You are there (you are there)...