A Fil-Am doctor’s humanitarian work

The lines disappear from the old woman’s face as the doctor peels off the bandages. She has seen nothing but darkness the past eight years, her eyes marred by fish scale-like growths of cataract. But today marks a change, and she feels rejuvenated. She ignores the nurse who asks if she can now see her own hand up close. Instead, she squints and focuses on the doctor. "Ang guwapo niyo pala," she giggles upon seeing for the first time the man who operated on her left eye for free.

The doctor smiles back with dimples as the nurse recites the routine for lola: a checkup in two days, another after a week, lastly the surgery on her other eye. Meantime, she can go home to her barrio in Nueva Ecija.

Outside the clinic more than a dozen other patients listen in on the excitement. Only a few understand Tagalog, since most of them came all the way from Ilocos or Cagayan. But they smile with hope for themselves. All are totally blind, indigents who could only leave the malady up to fate – until they heard of the free eye surgeries conducted half of the year by Dr. Guillermo de Venecia and volunteer-ophthalmologists from Manila and America.

Last Holy Week was a working one for Dr. Emong, as de Venecia is fondly called. Nine doctors from the University of Santo Tomas arrived at the two-story clinic in San Fabian, Pangasinan, to replace the specialists who had flown back to the US. More than 90 indigents were scheduled for surgery in three days. By Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, only Dr. Emong was left to check up the patients. All were successful, as with the 13,000 other free operations he and his volunteers have done since 1979. That was the year Dr. Emong came home for Christmas after a long absence as head of the Ophthalmology Department at the University of Wisconsin Medical School. It wasn’t for vacation. After a short visit to family in Dagupan, he drove off to the barrios of Zambales where he grew up during the War and where his dad had practised medicine. He noted the high prevalence of blindness among the poor due to cataract or glaucoma. After doing some free treatments, he decided to come back each year for more. The following Christmases, he brought with him associates from the medical school’s ophthalmology department. All were millionaire-doctors in America who found satisfaction in charity work in a land they hardly knew. By the mid-’80s, Dr. Emong’s team of volunteers declared Zambales cataract-free. That is, no indigent was still afflicted, only rich folks who could afford to pay or a rare case of a baby born with cataract. The program was such a success that the World Health Organization replicated it in Central Africa. Which was an inspiration coming full circle, for Dr. Emong had picked up the idea for his medical missions from Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who had done missionary work in Dark Africa.

About that time, Dr. Emong formalized his mission as the Free Rural Eye Clinics, a foundation with parallel boards of trustees in the US and the Philippines. From Zambales, he moved the FREC surgeries to his native Pangasinan, squatting at the Mangatarem or Dagupan district hospitals whenever his volunteers came. The vocation grew big as more and more doctors signed up for volunteer work each year, and hundreds of blind indigents lined up for free treatment. When Dr. Emong retired from the University of Wisconsin in the mid-’90s, he built the P15-million hospital in San Fabian from his savings and donations from kin and colleagues. He brought in six container vans of used but modern ophthalmology and surgery equipment.

The Christmas missions extended to half of the year that Dr. Emong and his wife Marta, a surgical nurse, are in the Philippines. They’re strictly for those who cannot afford. "We screen patients thoroughly," Dr. Emong says, "because we can never have enough resources for the poor." Their patients sure are lucky. Some receive free lens implants that cost $3,000 in the US. A few well-to-do patients have tried to sneak into the program by arriving in dusters and rubbing dirt on their arms and legs. Nurses always managed to spot them, sometimes by their soft palms, other times from tips that they came in SUVs that they parked far from the hospital. Those who are totally blind are readily taken in. "Anyone who bears the difficulty of going blind in both eyes can only be poor," Dr. Emong explains. "If you can help it, you’ll certainly do something before you lose your sight."

That commonsensical theory was evident in two of Dr. Emong’s patients last Holy Week - an aged couple who travelled all the way from Bicol. They had endured cataract in both eyes for almost a decade. On Good Friday, they hobbled out of the clinic holding hands tightly like young lovers on a date. They stared at each other’s face that they hadn’t seen for a long time, then kissed. It was a scene which gives Dr. Emong his psychic rewards.

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Last month peers from the American Academy of Ophthalmology awarded Dr. Guillermo de Venecia for Outstanding Humanitarian Service for his 22 years of free surgeries. Earlier the State Medical Society of Wisconsin cited him as Physician of the Year, and the Wisconsin Society of Ophthalmology gave him its first President’s Award. The Association of Philippine Ophthalmologists in America and the American Red Cross-Madison Chapter also separately gave him their Humanitarian Service Awards.

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