[Leica] Honduras Report

[images at comporium.net (Tina Manley)]

PESO:

I am back from a week in Honduras.  After over 25 years of making several
trips a year taking medical brigades to Honduras and Guatemala, I retired
in 2009 and haven't been back since.  This was a special trip to
investigate the possibility of building a permanent eye clinic to do
cataract surgery in Trinidad de Copan, Honduras.  There were only three of
us on this trip, an eye doctor who has been many times, the coordinator who
has planned many trips, and me.  We met up with another medical group of 19
people from Virginia and traveled to several remote villages with them.  I
learned to use an auto-refractor and examined almost 300 people, giving out
glasses when we had appropriate prescriptions.  The auto-refractor was fun
and very helpful but it kept me busy from dawn until dark and I didn't get
to take as many photos as usual.

I was very tempted to throw the Fuji X-Pro across the room several times.
 Every time I picked it up, something on the camera had changed.  Operator
error, I know, but very, very frustrating.  The little switch on the front
got moved to M for manual focus, +/- for exposure got changed, the aperture
ring on those lenses with one would move drastically, the manual focus ring
on the 14/2.8 would slip backward, turning off the auto-focus.  I got so
paranoid that I didn't trust the camera without checking every setting and
by that time my photo would be gone.  I ended up using the M240 and MM much
more than the Fuji and I had thought it would be the opposite.

The other thing that was extremely frustrating was that we had 21
photographers on the trip.  Everybody had a digital camera or phone or iPad
and everybody was taking photos constantly.  I had a hard time getting any
photos without other photographers in them.  The people posed and then
wanted to see their photos on the back of the camera.  One three-year old
took my camera and slid her finger across the screen to make the photo
change.  When it didn't, she started pushing the buttons to view the
photos.  The last time I was in Honduras, most people had never even seen a
digital camera.  I think I retired at the right time.

I'm downloading photos now and should have some to post next week. The
garden needs weeding and the lawn needs mowing so photos are down the list
of priorities today!

We identified over 60 patients who need cataract surgery and will begin
fund-raising for the clinic next week.  We hope to do our first surgeries
in March.

-- 
Tina Manley
http:// <http://tina-manley.artistwebsites.com/>www.tinamanley.com