Archives for September 2019

This week I am going to follow the pattern as before, which is the story about one of the optometry externs that I had the pleasure of meeting in the past. This extern, named Katie, is slightly different from the people I mentioned in the past in that she is originally from the United States. Another thing about Katie is that she lives in Ohio, and since it was only about an hour from home, she decided to stay at home during her time at this rotation. Without her living at my house, I still got to know her over the summer because of my employment as an optometric technician, which was at the same office that she learned at.  With this said, her story about growing up is unique.  

Katie is from a small town in rural Ohio and graduated from a very small high school and went to a local college for her undergraduate education. The reasoning for living so close to home is because of her responsibilities for her family. She is one of four children, she has twin younger brothers and one younger sister. Her twin brothers are very special in that one has cerebral palsy and the other one is deaf. With each brother comes a different set of responsibilities. Katie talked about how much her brothers meant to her, not because of their disabilities, but because of the things that they have given her the opportunity to learn about. Without them, she would not be fluent in American Sign Language, and as for her other brother, she would have never known how to work with people who have cerebral palsy. She even explained that the brother with cerebral palsy knows ASL, however, it was a little different than the typical sign language, but the twin brother who is deaf can still understand what he is trying to sign. To me, this is something that warms my heart every time I have thought about it. It makes me really think about how some things I take for granted; I have no idea what I would do if I could not speak to my twin sister.  

 

Katie’s story not only warmed my heart but some days she warms the heart of patients she treats. One time, I was lucky enough to be working and in the examination room, when a woman who was deaf came into the eye doctor office with a translator. I remember how beautiful the smile from the patients face when she realized the doctor knew ASL. My main takeaway from Katie’s story is that it is important to keep positive about some things that may bring you down in your life because sometimes those things that bring you down make you a better person.  

On this week of the blog, I am going to be talking about another optometry student named Marijeta. It has been around 6 years since I have personally seen her, but my mother keeps good contact with her through The Academy of Optometry which is a conference held every year in a different location around the United States. Since we last hosted her, she is now engaged, and her wedding is next May. For the begging of her life she had lived in Serbia, and due to the reasons, I will discuss later, she was lucky and moved to Rochester, New York. Her story has always inspired me about how strong families are, and no matter what they will do anything they can to stay safe and alive. 

Before we get into the story of Marijeta, it is important to know a brief history of what was happening in Serbia when she left the country. A town which is right along the border between Bosnia and Serbia, named Srebrenica, was a UN Safe Zone for fleeing Muslims from a Bosnian-Serb Army offensive, due to Bosnian War occurring at the time. However, in July 1995, more than 8,000 people were killed by the Bosnian-Serb Army in about 5 days, to what the UN calls an ethnic cleansing. Marijeta lived right outside Srebrenica, and the ethnic cleansing was very personal for her for she knows people who lost their lives during those 5 days. Her story of how she survived this horrible act is one that is not told very often for she was lucky in her escape.  

When the conflict reached Srebrenica, she was forced to leave because someone had thrown a grenade into her house, luckily the whole family was in the basement. They packed 12 family members into a stripped-out car under the cover of night, for there was fear of people reporting them in the area. Marijeta was in the car with her extended family, including her grandparents, her mother, and her sister which was slightly older than her. The fathers of the family were not in the car for the fear that at the border crossing all the men in the car would either be killed or forced to join the opposing army, so they hiked over a mountain range, which took about a month to complete. As for Marijeta’s older sister, there was a problem because she started to look more mature. This was a problem for her because the soldiers at the crossing might have taken her from the car and raped her. They did everything they could have to make her look younger and lucky it worked. However, when the car reached the border, they had to give the soldiers one of two things, all their money or their passports, which at the time was the only recorded information making them a citizen of Serbia. In order to not support the rebel cause, they gave the soldiers their passports and any real identification of being a person. As refugees, they managed to connect with the men of her family. From there her family survived day to day until they were permitted to go to the United States. Their process to the United States is another story that could fill an entire blog worth.  

Once again, I learned how fortunate I am to not have to struggle through adversities like the ones Marijeta faced with her family, but I can learn about the importance of family in rough times. Once again, thank you for reading about the amazing people I have met, and I hope you took something away from this amazing story.  

 

 

This week of the blog I am going to switch some things up. In the past, you have read about some of the optometry students that my family had the pleasure of taking into our home. This week I am going to be talking about Christopher. Christopher is a 19-year-old boy from Buxtehude, Germany, which is a city right outside of Hamburg. The way we got to meet Christopher is through an exchange program that my school has been doing for the last 35 years. In Pittsburgh, where I went to high school, this is one of the longest continuous exchange programs in my city.  

As soon as I learned that I could take in a student from Germany, I did everything in my ability to try to get permission from my parents to allow me to do this. My mother was extremely hesitant about this decision, but through the use of the right timing and mood, I convinced my mother to agree. During the fall of my junior year, Christopher along with 25 other German students came to my high school. The first night I decided to take Christopher on a joyride through the backroads of my town, you know typical high school student stuff. To Christopher, this was something completely new to him. To this day, he talks about how much fun it was to ride around at night and play music way too loud and driving way too fast. I took Christopher to his first high school football game, his first late-night meal at a local diner, the drive-in movie theater, and finally to our homecoming. Our adventures span so much further than the ones mentioned, but that could be 5 different blogs full of stories. At the end of his time with us, my mother and father were so glad he came into our home and touched our lives. When it was time to say goodbye, I was so distraught by the fact that I would not be able to see him again in a long time.  

When driving home from the airport after dropping him off, my mom mentioned how she had scheduled a cruise to the southern part of Italy and into Greece for the following summer, and that on the way home we would stop in Buxtehude for a few days and see Christopher and all the other German students that I became really close with.   

When the time came in the summer to see Christopher, I was beyond excited.  In the U.S. I got to show Christopher how teenagers have fun in the United States, and now it was his turn to show me how they had fun in Germany. The night started off with a trip to the Hofbrauhaus, which is a place that is hard to explain.

It is a sports bar mixed with oompah music and traditional German food and drinks. I was eighteen on the trip, so I took advantage of these legal opportunities, with parent approval of course. From there we went to a district called Reeperbahn, which would take an entire blog to just talk about this area, but instead, I am just going to say it was an experience to walk through it and watch the people there. When the night was coming to an end, Christopher took me to a party that had a lot of the people that were from the German exchange group. When our time came to an end in Germany, we were once again so distraught to say goodbye. But… for a later blog, we can breakdown the events that led up to the picture down below. Hint: That goodbye in Germany was not our last…

 

This week in the blog I will be talking about the story of Mark Hadean. Mark is from Detroit, Michigan, which means he is, unfortunately, a huge Michigan fan. When he came into my home for the first time with a Michigan shirt plastered across his chest, it was fair to say it was a rocky start since I am a Penn State fan. Mark, like the people in the previous blogs, is an optometry student of Salus University (Pennsylvania College of Optometry) and was living with us for three months as a part of his rotations which were needed for his graduation. Mark was one of the liveliest people I have ever met before, and based on his childhood, I have no idea how he does it.  

Like most of the stories of the people I have had the opportunity to meet, their life fat first glance seemed very vanilla. Starting off, Mark has a twin brother, an older sister, father, mother and an enormous extended family. This was typical for a family in Iraq. The entire family lived in a large compound. Mark and his family were very well off in Iraq. They owned and operated a huge carpeting production plant which was kept in the family business for generations before him. Almost immediately, Mark and his family were forced out of their country due to religious prosecution. Mark and his family are devoted Catholics in a country that was trying to wipe them off the face of the earth.  

For those who are unaware, Christians living in Iraq have been under persecution after the fall of Saddam Hussain. The day to day discrimination of Christians has caused a mass amount of them to move and seek refuge in other countries. Before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, there were more than 1.3 million Christians in Iraq. Today there are less than 250,000 people as of June 2019. Mark and his family were forced to leave due to this persecution. A boycott to not buy their families carpets is what lead to the demise of their riches and jobs. With a small amount of money, they were forced to leave their home of Iraq. By complete luck, a few members of Marks family, including himself, were granted Visas to come into the United States.  

Even in the United States they still had problems, they did not speak any English, and their job experience in Iraq was obsolete. To make things worse, they were settled in an area that Mark called, “The hood of Detroit”.  Mark attended an inner-city school now in the poverty cycle. Mark’s tenacity to do well fueled is fight against the cycle and did something with is life after high school. Mark from there went to college, became an optometry graduate, and now engaged.  

Mark and the stories of these students of optometry are where they are today not because they allowed the challenges at the beginning of their life effect who they are in a negative way. They still carry that chip on their shoulder, and they thrive with what they have. I will continue to admire them and try to understand the fuel that drives them to do great things. Thank you for reading about my blog, I hope you learned a little about Mark today.