Dr. Tamra Soriano taking glasses, compassion to Haiti

Thousands of miles away from her Carthage home, working inside a Haitian clinic, Dr. Tamra Soriano suddenly heard screaming from an adjacent room.

Working to help the poor in Haiti on a recent visit to that island nation, she knew two Haitian women who’d undergone cataract surgery the day before were inside that room. 

And so was her daughter. 

“I was concerned,” Soriano said with a slight shrug. “It was my daughter.”

Soriano, an OD at Carthage Eye Clinic at 130 East Fourth Street, rushed into the tiny examination room… and stopped dead in her tracks.

Just moments before, Soriano’s daughter had carefully removed the bandages from one of the Haitian woman’s eyes. 

The woman’s screaming wasn’t of anger, Soriano realized, but from pure and absolute joy.

For the old Haitian woman could finally see for the first time in a long time.

“Her hands were up in the air and she was saying ‘I can see, I can see!’” 

The woman reached out and touched the daughter’s face and arms, commenting on how beautiful she was, and blessing both the mother and daughter.

“It was just a great moment,” Soriano said with a smile.

At the end of next month, on April 30, Soriano will be making her third trek south to the poorest nation found in the Western Hemisphere. In fact, she’ll be visiting the poorest section of that poorest nation, made poorer still by the devastating January earthquake.

And thanks to a $550 donation from the Soroptimist International of Carthage — in which Soriano was being honored with the club’s Ruby Award, which honors women who work to better the lives of other women and girls through volunteer efforts with distributing new or donated eye glasses to the Haitian people.

“I am going to publicly spend this money on lenses, and make new glasses to take with me to Haiti,” Soriano said earlier this week. “I didn’t quite expect this much generosity,” she said, chuckling and pointing at Soroptimist members Susan Wendleton, Janet Lafon and Tina Hallmark. “Wow — I’ve got a lot of glasses to make.”

She believes she can build between 300 and 400 pairs of glasses. She’s also hoping generous Carthage and area residents will drop off their old or unused pairs of glasses between now and late April, which will graciously be accepted by Haitian residents suffering from eye problems.

“We take the donated glasses, repair them, verify the prescription and fit those the best we can… with the needs of the Haitian people,” she said.

Once Dr. Soriano arrives in Haiti, it will take her roughly 13 hours via vehicle to reach the tiny eye clinic in the northwest area of the island. She is partnering with the Northwest Haiti Christian Mission, a holistic ministry and development organization committed to the Haitian people.

Seeing the plight of the Haitian people inside a “National Geographic” magazine or on a television advertisement is one thing — to actually be there, she said, to touch them, to even speak to them, to listen to them — is something else entirely. Pictures, she said, simply doesn’t do it justice.

“It’s amazing,” she said, trying to describe how she feels when she volunteers her time and work for those in need. Particularly, she added, when a person walks into her Haitian clinic that can’t see, and walks out again with glasses on, and a huge smile on their faces. 

“If anyone gets the chance to do something like this, it changes your life. It just does.

“You go because you want to give something of yourself,” Dr. Soriano continued, “but you come back with so much more in return.”