A Closer View of Service Abroad

Everyone with two eyes receives two different stories about the world. For most of us, a structure called the optic chiasm crosses the nerves, and helps make sense of these perspectives. I have anisometropia, which means that my eyes don’t “team” or work well together. For me, one eye sees only things that are close well, while the other sees only things that are far.

Although my vision is fraught with challenges, I’ve always felt that I was luckier than many others. I donated birthday money to charities that treat vision problems and received letters with names of the recipients. It was initially gratifying to conjure distant faces of the patients who benefited from improved vision. But I was missing the opportunity to experience the impact up close.

In high school, I became a medical global impact fellow with Unite for Sight (UFS), a non-profit that provides eye care. I collected over 600 pairs of eye glasses by setting up a donation box at my high school and took them to the service site in Chennai, India. Every day, I traveled with ophthalmologists to set up camps across low-income areas. I would organize the glasses by power, set up eye exam charts, and hang up plastic signs advertising free eye care, and care for the patients at the camp.

I thought that the toughest part would be the travel and logistics. But the threads of the situation were crisscrossed in so many ways. The real challenge was to convince people to take treatment.

When I got to my first camp, the scorching heat gave me a headache and I popped open a Tylenol bottle. A young mother chastised me: “Inji sappidu! (Eat some ginger)!”

When she found out that she had glaucoma, probably caused by diabetes, she began outlining an ayurvedic treatment plan. This holistic healing system is over 3,000 years old and relies on herbal supplements without prescription medications or surgeries. “I’ll start taking vendayam (fenugreek seeds)…” I wanted to celebrate non-western alternatives alongside patients at the camps. But I also didn’t want them to go blind. (Could a seed fix glaucoma?)

I tried to keep both perspectives in my view somehow and weave them together. With my proficiency in Tanglish (Tamil+English), I helped patients focus on the ultimate goal: the capacity to be independent with improved vision.

My connection with patients was not just language; it was that I had a vision problem too. They frequently wanted to look at my glasses and asked about anisometropia. As I explained it, I became more relatable. My glasses were doing what our optic chiasm is doing every moment—trying to make sense of a world that is near and far, moving fast and slow, and full of contradictory sensory input.

I was invited by UFS to create profiles of patients’ journeys to better eyesight. They were so excited to have their pictures taken and have their stories recorded. I still remember my encounter with a woman Kamala, who tearfully expressed how her cataract-free eyes were helping her to make colorful maalais (garlands) for the temple.

Hearing anecdotes first-hand from patients like Kamala gave me a new view to cross with my distant dreams from before to paint a clearer, almost tangible picture. I was not just donating money to a cause—I was there at the frontlines, making a connection between a face and a living, breathing story that just gained hope from improved eyesight.

I have spent my life trying to reconcile two halves of my vision that don’t want to work together. My awareness of this has helped me apply this principle to examining the world around me, whether shadowing an eye surgery or listening to a new narrative. I try to remember that, although we are often unaware of it, our minds are always working to reconcile the different stories our eyes are telling us about the world.