© 2017 Jennifer Siegel
© 2017 Urantia Foundation
| My Experience As a Urantia Book Internet School Facilitator | Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2017 — Index | Dancing with God: Emerging in Sacredness—A Daughters of God Retreat |
By Jennifer Siegel, Colorado, United States
Editor’s Note: Jennifer Siegel is a longtime reader who is inspired to service by The Urantia Book. Her ongoing projects include running a youth study group, preparing meals for meetings and events hosted at Urantia Foundation headquarters, and heading renovations to the building. In this story she shares one of her experiences during a recent service adventure. She and her husband, Mo Siegel, traveled to Ethiopia to assist the Himalayan Cataract Project (www.cureblindness.org) with curing the world’s needlessly blind.
Day three volunteering at the Eye Clinic at the Arba Minch General Hospital in Ethiopia with the Himalayan Cataract Project began like all of them. The good news of removing the bandages from more than 175 waiting patients and their sounds of utter joy was incredibly moving. Some fell to their knees with disbelief at their first sight, others threw their hands in the air and made the joyful chirping noise that I thought I’d only hear in documentaries about faraway places. Many were subtle and shy, embarrassed to make their first eye contact in so very long.
As the day progressed, a new group of patients were examined and marked with tape. One piece above one eye means blind in that eye, two pieces of tape signals blind in both. I saw her squeezed in the crowd of the hopeful elderly sitting on benches awaiting their surgeries. She was impossible to miss. So pretty, about ten, in her stained pink shirt. Someone had put her hair up in braids, causing her sad yet beautiful face to be accentuated by two pieces of tape above each eye. Her blindness was not cataracts, she needed cornea replacements in both eyes.
I knew we had only six corneas brought in a cooler. They were kept in the break room fridge next to the water. Precious cargo waiting for the lucky ones. She needed two, she got one, she was a lucky one. Corneal transplant patients were special, the surgery was difficult and intricate and the corneas so valuable. We watched Dr. Geoff perform one on the night we arrived. Every delicate stitch made the eye look like the minutes on a clock when finished. Both gruesome and beautiful.
After her surgery my pink shirt girl was put in a small room with the other “lucky ones” and monitored for infection. And there she stood watching me from the crack of the doorway, all day and all evening long for four days. Waiting for me to pass, she’d wave, nod, or give a thumbs-up. Her new life became my reward for another hour spent trying to do my best.
She could see me with one eye, and I could feel her with all of my heart. We never saw a parent come visit, which made it traumatic saying goodbye. I had to leave my girl in the pink shirt in Ethiopia, but she will never leave me. She changed my heart and therefore changed my life. It’s good to remember you have a heart.
It’s good to remember you have a heart.
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| My Experience As a Urantia Book Internet School Facilitator | Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2017 — Index | Dancing with God: Emerging in Sacredness—A Daughters of God Retreat |