Parkhurst NuVision Focus on Missions

OUR FOCUS ON MISSIONS

I went on my first mission trip when I was a college student, so it was a lot of years ago. So it’s really a big part of what we do here at Parkhurst Nuvision. For much of the year we’re preparing and getting ready for what we’re going to do during that month of January when we go.

In many ways it’s the hardest week of my year, and sometimes I’m even thinking like, “Can I do this again?” Then I find it’s also the most rewarding trip of the year and that’s because of the people and the individuals that we actually get to touch there.

I can think of a patient that we took care of last year and just like many of them, these patients are not just blind in one eye, both eyes are blind. So you can kind of imagine, you know, even just by closing your eyes, you know what it’s like to live a life with no vision.

I recall this very nice lady that we took care of last year and she had her son with her, he was facing her, he was walking backwards and she had both hands on his shoulders and he was you know telling her in Spanish, “Watch for this stone and that stone.” So it took them like 30 minutes to get from the house where they were staying over to the clinic. So we go around the room and start taking the patches off, the morning after their operation and when we got to her, we took her patch off and you could just see her face light up and this smile and she looked around the room and she looked at the faces in the room and she said in Spanish, “I can see your beautiful faces.”

It’s just pretty awesome to be able to do a procedure, which is so safe and so effective, and not all that difficult to do, and have such an impact.

Here at Parkhurst Nuvision, we believe that everybody should have the opportunity to see. So that includes people here in the states, people here in San Antonio, it includes the people that we go treat when we go overseas and do our mission work, but it also includes those that we can’t physically reach.

So one of the programs that we have is that here at Parkhurst Nuvision, for every procedure that’s done, we actually fund and donate for a surgery to be done around the world in the third world so that a blind person can actually regain their sight. So our team just gets totally jazzed about that because they know that the work they’re doing here is effecting not only these patients but someone, somewhere around the world that has no other option.