They say the eye is the window to the soul. The face of the spirit. A door through which the entire world enters. The beginning and the end of our emotions. But here, in the sweltering, sticky heat of the jungles between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, lay a people who would welcome us with eyes much different than our romanticized notions. Murky, opaque, withering. Their smiles were comforting and familiar, but their gazes were vacant and expended.

 

San Jose de los Llanos was a lonesome Dominican village nestled among thousands of acres of sugarcane fields, populated by more broken down cars and tick-infested dogs than humans. The air, heavy with moisture, laid a salty sheen on my skin, making each breath a bit more labored.

 

Sugar was everything here, and work in the fields was the only work this deep into the jungled island. Standing from the hospital roof, I could see sugar for miles, ten-foot tall stalks that looked like a grassy lawn approaching the horizon, sweetening the scorching sunset. Centuries ago, this was traditional Taíno land, where tribal mythology and ancient island culture had been passed down through generations. Today, the Taíno language is extinct, and the inheritance of their Dominican ancestors is not Taíno oral tradition, but the legacy of the machete. The Spanish introduced sugarcane in the sixteenth century shortly after adopting the island as a slave colony, but if you look up ‘sugarcane Dominican Republic’ on Google, it’s hard to say that the Dominicans of today, scattered out there among the great infinite shoots of sweet grass, enjoy a much different lifestyle than their ancestors did. Phrases like ‘modern-day slavery’ and ‘generational exploitation’ tend to come up a lot in the search results.

 

 

Our displacement from home was painfully apparent. It’s not hard to pick out a group of foreigners in the DR, but it’s even easier when they’re wearing baby blue scrubs and pushing along thirty-five kilo military-grade trunks full of metal barrels and plastic knobs. As we hauled the stockpile of the TSA’s worst nightmare into the hospital, it’s safe to say we got our fair share of second looks.

 

 

The goal of our expedition to the Dominican interior was to help bring the clarity back to these patients, many of whom had not seen their families or the world around them in decades. Our team lugged a thousand pounds of surgical equipment, medical supplies, and eyeglasses to this tropical speck in the Atlantic. When we arrived, we set up a makeshift ophthalmic clinic and surgical theater in the local hospital, and a eyeglass dispensary in the office of the hospital director.

 

 

On the morning we opened the clinic, I met our first patients, men and women with weak and withered bodies, and dilated, cloudy eyes that were revealing despite their defectivity. These were a people physically broken, but their spirits remained strong, well-kept despite their blindness and proud despite their predicaments. With such close proximity to the equator, their eyes were especially susceptible to the sun’s rays, and here, the damage done was unmistakable. The sun shone exceptionally bright here, and over time, it had morphed the beautiful, clear dark centers of these eyes into thick, impermeable chalk white cataracts. This ivory interior, borne of a lifetime of age and the legacy of the sun, leaves these people blind - the eye’s own Cimmerian heart of darkness.

 

 

Without a patient’s trust, it is impossible to help them medically. As foreigners in Los Llanos, the most fundamental prerequisite for our mission was to gain our patients’ trust, making the gradual transition from unfamiliar aliens to compassionate members of the community. With open arms and broken Spanish, we were embraced by our patients, many of whom had been rejected by their own families due to their loss of ability to provide for themselves. Patients came from around the island, lining up outside the clinic before dawn. Some came in buses, some were delivered in electric carts by nuns, and others simply walked to the hospital. The loving affection that we were shown inspired us every day; the relationship forged with our patients became a transformatively empathetic connection that I have never experienced before.

 

 

We rose with the roosters every morning and slept with the insects and the loud whir of a propeller fan every night. We never retired, though, until we shared our stories from the day, reflecting, celebrating, and at times, crying.

 

On the third day came a patient who I will never forget. He came to the eyeglass clinic one evening, smiled at me warmly, and began to tell me his life story. He was a Haitian immigrant in the Dominican Republic and had a fruit farm where he grew guavas and zapote, a local favorite similar in flavor and texture to a sweet potato. Over the years, it had become increasingly difficult for him to read the local newspapers, as the letters and the world around him became nublado, cloudy. He heard about our clinic from a local church, but without means, he no choice but to walk. After a journey of two days and over seventy-four kilometers, he reached our clinic in Los Llanos. I met him in the eyeglass clinic, where my job was to perform refractions, measurements of patients’ eyes, and to dispense glasses based on these prescriptions. He carried a grocery bag full of water in one hand, and in the other, a spotless pair of plastic tortoise brown eyeglasses. He explained that he had saved up for months to buy himself a pair of reading glasses, but when he finally had enough and purchased this pair from a vendor in the capital, he woefully discovered that the lens was prescriptionless. Fake. Useless. They didn’t correct his vision whatsoever, and letters in the newspaper remained obscure, black silhouettes.

 

I sifted through the labeled glasses. His prescription was a harsh one, requiring a strong negative power and extreme correction to his astigmatism, a common condition that changes the shape of the cornea. I told him that the closest pair we had wouldn’t match his eyes exactly and that I was sorry. His eyes widened, and he silenced me. He explained that he knew I had done my best, and that God would pay for these glasses a thousand times in blessings to my family. He grinned, shook my hand, and began the long walk back to his farm. I watched him leave in disbelief, a man who had come so far to be so gracious for any help we offered to him.

 

 

Another morning, a nun visited the clinic and begged the doctors to help an old man she had been tending to in the church’s nursing home. Waiting in a room labeled ‘Chikungunya, Malaria, Zika,’ sat the man in evident suffering. Frail and unsteady, he was no longer capable of providing for himself and hadn’t eaten a proper meal in weeks. My father lifted the man’s eyepatch; underneath was an eye consumed by a treacherous bacterial infection, bursting with greenish discharge. The man’s cornea had ruptured, leaving him in constant pain and blindness. If the infection wasn't controlled, it would reach his brain and develop life-threatening meningitis, or worse.

 

 

Sadly, there was no hope of recovering his vision; however, we could control the infection, alleviate his pain, and prevent the spread of the infection. What we did next left me breathless: we would have to remove his eye.

 

The final decision was not easy to make. To remove the eye would be to surrender it, to submit to nature’s power and to accept the patient’s future of blindness - a harsh reality.

 

 

We were there to help people see. To open their windows. But what began as a mission to restore eyesight was becoming much more; we were starting to realize that what these individuals needed most of all was health care, a helpful hand to guide them through the tolls of nature.  We were there simply to help them in their time of need, to show them that there was someone who cared, who desired their happiness, and that we would achieve these goals in whatever way we could.

 

The procedure lasted around half an hour. My father successfully removed the infected cornea, opening into the anterior chamber of the eye. He removed the interior of the eye, filled with pus, and thoroughly sterilized the cavity to prevent any spread of the infection. After the surgery, I washed the blood from his face and patched him as he lay on the surgical bed.

 

I looked at his wrinkled, unshaven face again, his right eye blind, and his left eye now behind a surgical patch. This man had nothing left; he was too old to work, pain and disease wracked his body, and he lived every day behind an infinite curtain of blackness. I prayed that with this surgery, he could return to this world, and experience it and love it as he once had. I rolled the microscope out of the way to make room to carry the surgical bed out. Just as my father and I picked up the bed, the man’s face twisted with pain. My father rushed from the end of the bed to his side. His jaws clenched, and before we realized what he was doing, he sat himself up, beamed, held up his thumb, and uttered “que Dios te bendiga.”

 

We were humbled by a blessing from a blind man.

 

The eye may be the window to the soul. And though I couldn’t see through his window, I knew that his soul was still there, very much bright and alive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shan Reddy is a junior at Clark and a staff writer for the Charger Chant. He wrote this piece for the Charger Chant in his travel journal in the clinic while on a medical mission in the Dominican Republic. For reusage rights of the above photographs, please contact us at chschargerchant@gmail.com.

 

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