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A vision restored.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Tim Christie The Register-Guard

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Eugene-based Cascade Medical Team nears the end of an intense six days of tending to the highland villagers in western Guatemala. The team packed up and left Barillas on Saturday, April 5.

BARILLAS, Guatemala - Nurse Verna Stallsworth spots the boy sitting on the floor of the town gym on this Thursday afternoon, a little guy with a round face, rocking back and forth, lost in his own world.

She approaches the boy and offers him a dinosaur Band-Aid, but he doesn't respond. You can give him the Band-Aid, his aunt tells the nurse, but he can't see it.

Dr. Bill Cox, a Eugene ophthalmologist, examines the boy. His milky eyes tell the story: Congenital cataracts have robbed him of his vision.

But Cox isn't sure he can help the boy. He hasn't done pediatric surgery for a long time. And the boy would never sit still for surgery - he would have to be anesthetized. The anesthesiologists and their equipment are up the hill at the hospital. The big microscope Cox uses for cataract surgery is here at the gym, and it would be difficult to move it to the hospital.

Eye nurse Carol Hernandez will have none of it. We have to help him, she tells Cox. She cries. She begs. Then one of the MacGyvers on the team, the men whose job it is to make things work, tells Cox that they can move the microscope. No problem.

And so it is that Marvin Enrique, age 3, sees for the first time.

Civil unrest changes plans

So far, members of the Eugene-based Cascade Medical Team have encountered unseasonably cold weather, missing luggage, cold showers, power outages, gastro-intestinal distress and other inconveniences.

At Thursday night's team meeting, John Sigler, co-staff director of Helps International, tells those gathered that Barillas has posed the most logistical challenges of any site that the parent organization has set up.

"You guys have rose to the occasion," he says. "Now we have another road...

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