Tuesday, May 20th, 2025 – What a blessing to have such giving and selfless professionals to work with. The Medical/Pediatric team traveled to Santiago de Quito, where they saw 64 optometry patients, 65 Adult patients, and 18 pediatric patients.
There were lines of villagers in their colorful clothing waiting for the first doctor that some of them may have not seen in years. Despite being only a few hours away from the capital city of Quito and Ecuador providing universal healthcare for all of its citizens, lack of transportation and resources are the main obstacles to care in these remote areas of South America. Our team treated conditions that we take for granted. Conditions that are taken care of with a flash of our insurance card and a 5-minute drive to the urgent care center.
The children were also in desperate need of attention. During this mission, we were fortunate to have our translators, our pediatrician, and pediatric nurse with us.
With the donations of our generous benefactors, we were able to bring care to patients who would otherwise continue to suffer. Your generous gifts allowed us to hire a bus to take the team to the village, purchase and provide medications such as antibiotics, anti-parasitics, and pain relief treatments, We are also able to purchase and rent the machines that we need to perform the vision-restoring surgeries that keep the young and the elderly homebound and isolated from the world and the people they love.
With your help, we also operated on 24 cataract patients from 7:30 in the morning until 8:00pm at night. Restoring eyesight to a 14-year-old boy who could only see shadows. Because of his blindness, he had suffered massive burns on his leg and was almost run over by a car he did not see coming, if not for his brother. With the help of our surgical director and our anesthesiologist, we were able to give him his childhood back.
