Their mission: Restore sight to the penniless

Along the national highway in San Fabian, Pangasinan, is an unusual hospital. The Free Rural Eye Clinic accepts only one special kind of patient. He must be both sightless and penniless to merit the attention of specialists. Mostly American doctors work in the two-story structure behind a curtain of trees. They are among the world’s highest paid ophthalmologists, but at the FREC they do not charge a cent. They even pay their own way to join yearly eye operations for charity. And since the hospital launched a decade ago they have done more than 16,000 free surgeries to scrape cataract, clean pterygium, and ease glaucoma.

Filipino-American medic Guillermo de Venecia runs the FREC eight months a year. With Irish-American wife Marta, an ophthalmologic nurse, he checks each patient, oversees eye procedures, and ensures post-surgical care. Plus non-medical tasks: maintaining the facility and equipment, raising funds for upkeep, and mobilizing Filipino doctors to help. The other four months de Venecia spends in Wisconsin, where he used to practice and now recruits surgical volunteers. More non-medical work: he talks US hospitals into donating eye-care devices. In the first half of 2009 FREC performed 1,325 cataract and 631 other procedures. When the US doctors fly in after the holidays and team up with Filipino counterparts, each will do at least 50 surgeries in two weeks.

FREC is witness to countless happy tales of sight restoration. There was the old couple, both blind from cataract, seeing again after 12 years, upon initial treatment of one eye. When the bandages were taken off they beheld each other speechless then walked away hand in hand, a bit wobbly yet sure of new beginnings. There is the poor woman who, out of gratitude for cataract surgeries she would never afford, stayed on as unpaid aide. She keeps spic and span the FREC “Hut-el”, a nipa hut behind the hospital where patients spend the night after surgery for the next day’s checkup and sendoff. There was the grease-caked beggar who refused to be cleaned up for surgery, fearful that no one would give alms anymore if his sight returns. He is now gainfully employed in a nearby ice plant. And there are the rare cases of infants born with eye defects, but instantly remedied by FREC experts.

De Venecia formed FREC in 1978 as a way of thanking Zambales province, where his family had fled during the War. At 46 and the peak of his medical career then, he scoured the barrios by his lonesome for patients blind in both eyes from cataract. It was his basic gauge of impoverishment. No man would let himself go blind if he could pay to have at least one eye treated. De Venecia didn’t aim to compete with local doctors who could ably care for the well to do. In 1982 he brought along his first volunteer, Dr. Peter McCanna, who introduced lens implant to RP via the FREC. Other docs heard of de Venecia and McCanna, and signed up. By 1988 Zambales was cataract-free; that is, no poor Zambaleño, only can-affords, had the eye disease. De Venecia moved FREC to his Pangasinan home province. For another decade he labored from space lent him in community hospitals. And in 1999 he built the hospital in San Fabian that takes in patients from all over Luzon. To date the FREC has healed more than 26,000 eye patients. But de Venecia laments barely scratching surface. He estimates that at least 350,000 poor countrymen need cataract and other urgent eye surgery.

De Venecia always wanted to be a healer. In high school he had read about Albert Schweitzer and dreamt of joining the German musician-philosopher-physician’s medical mission in central Africa. De Venecia followed his doctor-dad, the Philippine consul general to Hamburg, and his German mom, to study medicine in Europe. Surgical training brought him to Wisconsin, where he married and came to head the state university med school’s ophthalmology department. Career and family distracted de Venecia from working under Schweitzer. But he never forgot to emulate his idol’s charity. In a roundabout completion of the circle, the World Health Organization has replicated in central Africa the best practices of de Venecia’s FREC in the Philippines. The FREC operates on a meager budget of $40,000 (P2 million) donations per year, or roughly $200 (P10,000) per procedure.

Helping de Venecia run FREC are relatives and close associates. Heading the trustee board is businessman Albert del Rosario, de Venecia’s brother-in-law and once ambassador to the US and head of the Philippine Cancer Society. Trustees too are: Foreign Affairs Sec. Alberto Romulo; cousin Oscar de Venecia, former head of Rotary Philippines’ Polio Eradication Drive; and Dr. Antonio Say and Alfred Li of the Tzu Chi. Say, who studied under de Venecia, is also medical director of the Tzu Chi that runs a similar free eye clinic in Bacood, Sta. Mesa, Manila; Li is the CEO. De Venecia’s kin are following his footsteps. Nephew Dr. Braulio de Venecia took up ophthalmology and worked for free at FREC before flying to Spain on scholarship. Grandniece Margarita Bondoc, a fresh medical grad, is contemplating ophthalmology too when specialization time comes.

For inquiries: call (075) 5233699. Donations welcome: Free Rural Eye Clinic, UCPB-Dagupan account number 203-1333-295. In North America, make checks payable to: Free Rural Eye Clinics Inc., PO Box 5242, Madison, WI 53705-0242.

*      *      *

“The farthest distance between two persons is the absence of love. The closest distance between two persons separated from each other is the bond of love.” Shafts of Light, by Fr. Guido Arguelles, SJ, is available in cards: P100 per box of 25. To order, e-mail: [email protected]

*      *      *

E-mail: [email protected]