For this project I chose to interview my father, Dr. Mark Hite, who is an ophthalmologist. During his final year of medical school, in 1989, my dad went to La Vega, Dominican Republic on a service trip with a Christian organization from his home state of Ohio. Their goal was to provide eye-specific medical care to people suffering from cataracts, blindness, and other issues. While in the Dominican Republic my father’s role was to perform patient intake prep patients for surgery and shadow surgeries in the operating room. He stayed at a camp with other medical students and doctors with amenities similar to those we will have in Nicaragua. He also served a population similar to the population we will be serving in that they were also Latin American, rural, and impoverished. In order to better understand the experience of a medical service trip, its benefits and limitations, and the role of foreign aid in impoverished communities abroad from the perspective of someone who has done it, I asked the following questions:
- Can you describe the role of the service trip in the community?
- Can you describe your role within the service trip?
- In what ways was the trip difficult?
- In what ways with the trip rewarding?
- What do you think was the short-term and long-term impact of this trip?
- Do you feel that this trip was immersive? Do you feel that you learned about the community that you visited?
- Is given the chance, would you do it again?
The interview, which lasted approximately 10 minutes, is posted below. I have transcribed or summarized my father’s responses to the questions as well.
L: “I wanted to talk to you about your service trip to the DR because we are going on a similar service trip in Latin America, also with medical implications, and we’ve been talking a lot in our class about issues of responsible service and responsible medical service… So I just wanted to get your opinion on what the trip was like for you.”
M: It was obviously a very rewarding experience, and an eye-opening one as well. “The gap between the technology and the access to services that we have in our first world countries compared to third world countries was truly astounding. Many of these patients did not really have access to even the most basic of health care services, so they choose to just live with the disability that they have.”
L: “And then it gets worse?”
M: “Absolutely, and then it becomes not only a stressor to the patient but to their whole families that are forced to take care of them.”
- The Role of the Service Trip in the Community
M: “The community we were in was a small town in the Dominican Republic called La Vega, and it was a very Catholic-oriented community. The trip we took was actually through a Christian medical society, so it had a slight evangelical component as well, and the church locally was very welcoming. The church was also an access point to allow patients to know about the trip and spread word throughout the community. The community was very supportive and often brought gifts and provided some services for us at our camp… People who had skills with electrical, people who had skills with plumbing, people who had skills with construction were all instrumental in setting [our facilities] up.
L: And the medical focus of the trip was purely ophthalmology?
M: “Purely ophthalmology, but it covered all facets of ophthalmology from giving glasses to people who couldn’t see, to pediatrics, to cataract surgery, to plastic reconstructive surgery.”
2. Your Role Within the Service Trip
M: “I was actually a medical student at the time, so I hadn’t started my internship or my residency. My role was to assist another participant on the trip who was an ophthalmology resident, he was a senior resident out of Texas, and he kind of took me under his wing and taught me a lot in kind of a junior resident role about ophthalmology, which is something I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to.”
3. Difficult Parts of the Trip
M: “I think just seeing the level of poverty that existed in the community. It was difficult to imagine, in an almost sort of first world guilt, to see whole families living in small crude corrugated metal shacks, people without running water, without plumbing, to see the level of disability that people, even children, put up with on a daily basis and how they were treated.”
4. Rewarding Parts of the Trip
M: “I think the most rewarding part was seeing the response of the local community… seeing that you could provide a very valuable service and make a difference in people’s lives. Not a difference like we typically do, where we think oh, I’ll give money to this cause, but a truly tangible difference where you felt like you were putting hands on and creating a better situation for not just one person but for their family as well.” The sense of doing work for the purpose of helping others, rather than for a financial gain or other incentive, was also extremely rewarding.
5. Impacts in the Short-Term & Long-Term
M: “I think that short-term, the response was that it gives a lot of people hope… I think long-term, you train local providers in the area, giving them skills to better handle these problems in their communities, and we leave behind a large amount of supplies and leftover materials that can be used in the community, many things that they really would not have access to… we also set up referral networks to other places… to the major cities in the Dominican Republic so people who have more needs or ongoing needs could be referred to providers there.”
“I think it was a very positive impact. Not only did we feel like we made a difference, but there were people who worked with us who remained in the community.”
6. Immersion in the Community
M: “We actually had made friends not only with the peace core community but also with some of the host families of the peace corp communities, and they would invite you into their homes, and you got to see not just how the patients you were taking care of were living, but the leaders of the community that were organizing the trip lived as well.”
7. Would You Do It Again?
M: “Oh, I would definitely do it again. I think that especially now, being fully trained I could bring a lot more skill and I think the difference would feel even greater being able to actually be a leader of the group.”