The slapper

I got slapped this week by a 70 year-old woman. I think she was trying to love pat my face. But she was doing it intentionally hard. And then she grabbed a handfull of my dreads and told me that I needed to cut my hair off and that I was never going to get a husband looking the way I did. And then she just kept patting my face. Really harrrrrrrd. I purposefully put Slapper at the end of my list of people to see for eyeglass measurements because she was getting on my nerves. I had to personally escort her to a bench and tell her to stay there until I called her. She didn´t listen. She followed me back to my station, kept pulling the sheets back and telling me to see her next. I´ve never heard anyone use the word gringita so many times in one breath. She was also quite a giant of a woman to be Peruvian. She was taller than me by a long shot.
It was campaign week. I measured eyes all week and gave out glasses. Out of the glasses that have been donated to us, most of them are huge and old and totally awesome. I would totally wear them in public, but I guess the Peruvians didn´t think they were as cool. I wore them around the clinic in an effort to encourage the people. I got a lot of people laughing at me. But it was fun. Everytime I would put an 'ugly' pair of glasses on a patient they would insist that they couldn´t see. And then I would let them try on one of the newer pairs, often times not their measurement. Then they would start singing me the Hallelujah chorus about how they could see perfectly. Some people were honest though. They took their big, awesome glasses with a grateful heart because they could finally see.
Sight is one of those things I´ve taken for granted. Because unless you can´t see, you just don´t even notice it. But after having giving people glasses all week, I´ve realized that giving the gift of sight is giving someone a huge thing. Jesus healed many people of blindness. I feel like I got a small taste of doing that too. Except for instead of having Jesus' face be the first that they see, it was a dirty, dreaded gringa.