Doctor for a day

While living in Cusco a friend of mine asked me if I could help out being a translator English/Spanish and Spanish/English. I had already finished my 4 weeks Spanish classes at the Amauta Spanish School, and felt pretty confident about being a translator. She told me it was part of a project for her Church, an evangelical Church, which organized a free medical clinic in the area of San Sebastian in Cusco.

Doctors from the United States came to Cusco to give free medical advice and medicine for 1 week. Since we were going to have to translate medical terms, we were practicing body parts and other useful words in Spanish a few hours before we would start. When we arrived at the plaza we walked around to say hello to everybody and to search for a place where we were needed.

I ended up helping out the opticians in their quest to provide everybody with adequate glasses. All the people first had to stand in line to get eye drops, and their eyes checked, then they had to wait to get their eyes measured and to get the appropriate description, and finally stand in line again with their prescription to get the right glasses. I was helping out at the last stage; searching the right glasses for each person. This turned out to be more difficult than expected. For a lot of people they did not have the right prescription glasses, so then I had to explain in Spanish that our supply was limited, and that we were sorry that we could not help out today. But for most of the people we did have glasses, not all as pretty as we would want them to be, but functional, and that was the main point of the project. It was very satisfactory and rewarding to help out the doctors.

People were so grateful, and even called me doctor, it felt good: doctor for a day! Several times we helped a person with terrible eyesight who had never had glasses before, their reaction when they put on the glasses was priceless; a big smile on their face, and incredibly grateful. It was busy the entire time, the line seemed to be endless. And just that day the optical team helped over 300 people.

Tired and satisfied we finished working at 18:00. We shook hands, thanked each other, and ended the project. There was a speech from a representative of the mayor, and we all got a special calendar as a thank you for our work.