8 o’clock in the morning… I wondered what I could do for the people here.
I was finally standing in front of NgỌk Linh Hospital in Vietnam~
After asking around the hospitals in Vietnam, we finally decided to liaise with NgỌk Linh Hospital as it was big, equipped with facilities similar to Korea and it looked like a hospital in the rural area.
The hospital was packed with people …..not just some…. but many people ….
At 8 in the morning, we went earlier to the hospital to prepare so that we were ready to cope with the large number of patients and in fact, we thought that there would be no patients at this time. However it was not what we thought. The moment we reached there, we saw young children staring at us, the foreigners, with wide eyes and they seemed amazed with our presence. (I guess I was the same when I saw foreigners in Korea.) …. Wanting to say ‘Hi’ but shy…. I could hear people talking noisily in the background, curious about our presence.
Treatment started…There were many patients needing vision examination and eye examination. Occasionally there were patients needing eye drops to dilate their pupils and many patients needed help walking due to poor visual acuity. It was just like what we did during voluntary activities in Korea.
At that moment, a group of children wearing same clothing appeared… I realized it immediately as they were all friends from the same orphanage. The shocking truth for this group of children was that they were born without eyes… not just one but all of them…. Later while we were at the countryside, Dr Kim told us that the poor water quality could be one of the reasons leading to children without eyes as it was as black as waste water and there were a limited number of days where Vietnamese people could only get clean water. Not only that, due to insufficient crime prevention measures in Vietnam, there were many unplanned pregnancies and these pregnant women tried to abort the fetuses by taking abortion drugs that didn’t get rid of the fetuses and the eyes of these babies were not developed due to these drugs. This group of children was the outcome…..
However this group of people was children themselves. Like us in Korea, they joked with each other and laughed together, these young children were no different from us… Indeed they should be the same as us. However when I saw these children, they all seemed to carry a serious expression like they were criminals with their heads down. I could feel my eyes streaming with tears as even though they were young, they had to be treated like disabled people and listen to people talking about them being their backs constantly. They were blind but not deaf. I could only provide them my warm hand during the examination and greet them warmly whenever I could. Maybe I felt that it was the best thing I could do for them.
We connected with each other through our hearts...
Another unforgettable friend entered the room ….
This friend still remained in my memory even though she was of no difference with the other friends. Looking at her reminded me of the horror movie, ‘The Ring’ where the main character climbed out of the TV and her eyes were opaque. Our friend was like the main character with opaque eyes. At this young age, which was the best time to see the beautiful world, she could not due to the white membrane covering her cornea. Actually, it was like the elderly people who had developed cataracts in Korea.
As expected, she could not see anything except slight light rays…. Yet this child didn’t forget to put a pure bright smile on her face throughout the whole treatment process and thanked us for what we did. Numerous thoughts flowed by my head…..
All this while, I was grateful for what I had, so why did I always complain about what’s insufficient? I was born with two eyes and through these eyes I was able to see many beautiful places, through these eyes I was able to see thousands of facial expressions and through these eyes I was able to share the tears and laughter with the people around me. Maybe I had forgotten about this fact for a moment... I had never felt that I needed to feel grateful for what I had till now… The connection with these friends actually awoke my inner heart.
In the morning when I was standing in front of the hospital, I worried about what I could do for these people. It was really unnecessary as through these friends, I was able to experience something I couldn’t feel in Korea. The heart-to-heart communication with people…
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