St. John Goes to Nicaragua

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!