{"id":145,"date":"2016-07-07T21:02:33","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T21:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.brentblack.com\/cart\/?page_id=145"},"modified":"2016-07-17T23:33:57","modified_gmt":"2016-07-17T23:33:57","slug":"sidebar-boy-and-eyeglasses","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/montecristi-foundation\/sidebar-boy-and-eyeglasses\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s More to Life Than Hats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Boy_with_Glasses_0252\"While we were eating and buying hats woven by her daughter in-law, the\u00a0woman\u2019s five-year-old son was in perpetual motion, running in and out of the house, all around the room, under the table, happily squabbling with his sister and brother at every opportunity. Typical five year old, right?<\/p>\n

Except for his eyes. As I enjoyed watching his non-stop orbits around and\u00a0through us, I saw that something was seriously wrong with his eyes. They\u00a0appeared to operate independently, often looking in opposite directions. Fine\u00a0for a Jackson Chameleon but not for a little boy.<\/p>\n

I started to worry about how this would affect his life. No doubt he would\u00a0be teased mercilessly by other kids. Most likely he would never be able to\u00a0learn to read. Not good prospects.<\/p>\n

I hoped maybe we could help. We had arranged to bring an optometrist to the\u00a0village. She would be there Thursday. It was Monday. We wanted to give eye\u00a0exams to the weavers and provide free glasses as needed.<\/p>\n

Jorge explained about the eye doctor. He asked her to come for herself and\u00a0to bring the boy. We would ask the doctor if the boy\u2019s condition could be\u00a0treated.<\/p>\n

They both came. As did forty-plus others we had invited, mostly the older\u00a0weavers and a few younger ones who knew they had vision problems.<\/p>\n

I waited nervously while the doctor examined the boy. She told the mother\u00a0that we had caught the problem in time. He was young enough that he could be\u00a0treated successfully with a progressive series of corrective lenses. I told the\u00a0doctor and the woman that I would be more than happy to pay for whatever needed\u00a0to be done.<\/p>\n

Then I had to go outside. I was having a problem with my own eyes. They were\u00a0leaking all over my face.<\/p>\n

A year later<\/strong> (November 2007), the mother reported that he is definitely\u00a0improving. He has a second pair of glasses, the second step on his road to\u00a0normal vision. When I walked next door to a local mini-tienda to buy snacks and\u00a0stuff for the documentary video crew I was guiding, he tagged along after me.\u00a0While I was paying the shopkeeper, the boy reached up and took the bag of stuff\u00a0off the counter then carried it back to his house for me. He put it down and\u00a0ran off to play again. He never said a word. I understand shy. He had spoken\u00a0volumes.<\/p>\n

As I watched him zoom around the corner of his house, my eye problem\u00a0returned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While we were eating and buying hats woven by her daughter in-law, the\u00a0woman\u2019s five-year-old son was in perpetual motion, running in and out of the house, all around the room, under the table, happily squabbling with his sister and brother at every opportunity. Typical five year old, right? Except for his eyes. As I enjoyed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":1077,"parent":141,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-145","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4220,"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145\/revisions\/4220"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.brentblack.com\/cart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}