Cuadrado, Casa, Circulo, Corazon

Cuadrado, Casa, Circulo, Corazon (Square, House, Circle, Heart) Those were the names of the shapes on the eye chart during the vision exams that we did during our time in Tehuantepec. Of course because the children were young, some didn't know their shapes. Others had rather unique names for the shapes. A circle often became a ball or a tire and a heart became an apple or as one little girl insisted, a butterfly. A square became a T.V.


Most of the week I sat with the children as they read the shapes from the eye chart. Because the room was noisy and the children were young, I had to loudly repeat the shape that the child named so that the person near the chart could determine if the child was correct or not. I was probably repeating those shapes in my sleep after saying them all day long.

Why were we doing this vision testing? The Mexican school system does not have any type of vision screening for children and therefore many of the children needed glasses but no one knew they did. Their vision deficits were creating learning problems for them in the classroom. Therefore we include vision screening as a part of any community health program.

As I helped test the children, the words to the song "Open My Eyes Lord, I Want To See Jesus" kept running through my head. Pray that the vision of these children would not only be corrected so that they could excel in school, but that they would see, with their eyes wide open, how much God loves them.

"Ears that hear and eyes that see--the Lord has made them both" Proverbs 20:12
"My eyes are ever on the Lord" Psalm 25: 15

An interesting side note was that one of the men on the mission team was having a great deal of trouble with his Spanish. He was in the same room as the vision testing and was weighing the children. He did learn to say "take off your shoes and stand on the scale" in Spanish but not much else. At the end of the week, we had some free time and so the U.S. mission group members decided to have their eyes tested. This one man, after hearing me repeat the shapes so many times during the week, took the entire vision test and correctly named all of the shapes--in Spanish!