When:

Monday, January 9, 2012
7-8:30 p.m.

Where:

Go the Second Mile Office
910 N. 160th Street
Shoreline, WA  98133

You know the story about the man walking along a beach picking up starfish and throwing them back into the water? Those observing him thought it was futile to be looking for starfish and rescuing them and returning them back into the water. He couldn’t possibly throw all the starfish back. There were hundreds of them all over the beach. It seemed so futile. It won’t make a difference. But the man’s response was that it would make a difference to that one starfish.

In some ways that is what I feel after a trip like I just returned from. Tibet and China are such an entirely different culture, it is hard to imagine you could make a difference. But there we were anyway with our hundreds of pairs of prescription glasses, hundreds of pairs of sunglasses, eye charts and testing ladders and of course wearing white coats. (Okay, white cowboy shirts with pearl buttons but no one noticed!)

Landing in Shang ri-la, China or Historical Tibet at 9,800 feet above sea level took a bit of getting use to. The folks of Colorado that were part of the team thought nothing of it and set off exploring, while I tried not to go up even one stair lest my lungs explode. On day three I was acclimatized enough and we packed up and headed off to our destination: a village still 6 hrs away accessible by traversing over a couple 12,000 ft. high passes on one very rough and windy, 4 wheel drive only road. It was so bumpy that the roof rack carrying all of our supplies broke off the rain gutter and dented the inside ceiling of the jeep! Now that was bumpy!

I will follow this up by saying it is all relative, isn’t it? As I was reflecting that this road bordered on dangerous, there was the couple that showed up at this village riding a motorcycle with no helmets and their dog in between them! It is all relative!

Once we arrived at our destination, we loaded up all the eye care testing supplies on what is called a toe la gee (phonetic spelling of course), which looks like a rototiller pulling a wagon, and took everything over to the guest house where we set up shop in the bar. We did two eye clinics in that village: one at another village a few hours away and a couple alongside the road as a special favor! I learned it’s all about the special favors here!

I often wonder on these trips if I am really making any difference at all? But then something happens to make one person stands out and you see life for that person has changed because you were there.

This man is that person for me. He was clearly old, and had walked to our clinic in the village of Habba, one of the few Muslim villages in the area. He had glasses as thick as coke bottles and literally looked like two coke bottle bottoms encased in a larger frame of glass. Very WWII bad movie portrayal style . . . (you know the ones I’m talking about). They were broken in the middle and had accumulated so much grease nothing we had would repair them. We gave him the strongest pair of glasses we had, assuming they would not help and went about trying to fix his old ones. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed him looking around, and when he took out his matches to light his pipe he stared at them as if seeing them for the first time. A slight grin came across his face. His life had changed.

Although there are thousands, probably millions of rural villagers in Tibet and China that cannot see well, this one man now could. Like the starfish whose lives were changed because a man decided to throw them back into the sea, his life changed because we came to his village with a pair of glasses. And in the end, it is all about the starfish that were thrown back and not the enormity of the task, nor the size of the impact, nor the numbers who were not impacted. It is about the one whose life was changed.

The estimate is the team gave away 140+ pairs of prescription glasses, tested twice that many and gave away maybe 300 pairs of sunglasses. There is a large number of people with cateracts related to UV exposure in high elevations, so the sunglasses are particularly needful.

The last two nights were spent in Tiger Leaping Gorge, where they hiked 16 miles at about 2800+ feet elevation gain. There were sensational mountain views. The tops were so high they created their own weather patterns. We stopped at several guest houses along the way to either eat or stay.  It was amazing! See you soon!