Visionary doctor sheds light on Haitian village

Friday, March 16, 2001 | 4:29 a.m.

On a clear night in Lascahobas, you can see the Milky Way.

"It is spectacular," said Kenneth Westfield, a Las Vegas eye doctor who has seen the celestial view many times from the small Haitian village.

"There's no light to take away from it," he added. "You don't realize you live in the Milky Way until you've seen it."

If it weren't for frequent visits from the Las Vegas doctor, however, many people who live in the mountainous area would miss the view.

Westfield, medical director of the Shearing-Westfield Eye Institute in Las Vegas, makes the trek to Lascahobas annually to treat patients who are blinded by cataracts, in the early stages of glaucoma or who simply need eyeglasses.

The medical equipment Westfield hauls to the village 45 miles northeast of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti's capital, he leaves as a donation to Lascahobas Hospital, a 60-bed facility that serves the nearly 56,000 people in the area. The hundreds of eyeglasses he brings -- unclaimed by those who have left them in Las Vegas hotel rooms -- are fitted and given to those with poor eyesight.

To the villagers, he seems to be a miracle worker, a godsend who comes once a year and literally restores sight to the blind. Hundreds line up to see him when he arrives.

"It's just like heaven come to Earth," said Estelle Dubuission, founder of the Friends of the Children of Lascahobas, a 25-year-old small nonprofit organization. "Where would people be if they had to pay for glasses, have cataract surgery?

"People walking in the street, they thought they were blind," she said. "All they needed were a pair of glasses.

"Every year people come and say they are praying for the doctor."

Lack of services

Dubuission, in her early 70s, is a native of Lascahobas who lives part time in Brooklyn, N.Y. She has been working full-force for nearly 25 years to improve the quality of life in her village.

The average person in Lascahobas lives in a cinder-block house with a thatched roof, dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. The conditions invite disease. Many are too poor to travel to Port-Au-Prince for medical care.

Dubuission began by volunteering to drive children to school. In 1995 she began building Lascahobas Hospital, using private donations garnered from New Yorkers.

Today the hospital offers emergency services, gynecological services, a pediatric clinic, general medicine, a surgical lab, and two operating rooms, and is staffed by one doctor and six nurses. It's an improvement from the dispensary that provided services before the arrival of the hospital, she said.

"People were dying (of typhoid malaria)," Dubuission said during a phone interview from Brooklyn. "Some schoolchildren would die with their school uniform on. It was that time that I said, 'The only way I will die in peace is if I build a hospital.' "

However, she said, "One doctor is not enough. We need more doctors."

To compensate for the lack of doctors, Dubuission arranges humanitarian missions, bringing doctors in from other countries for short periods of time.

Eye doctors have been traveling to the village since 1982. Plastic surgeons and dentists also make the trek.

Westfield has been a part of the effort for six years. He was invited to participate in the missions by Dr. John Mitchell, an ophthalmologist and vice president of the Friends of the Children of Lascahobas whom he met at a medical conference.

Out of the 650 patients Westfield met with during his visit to the village in February, 55 were operated on to remove cataracts and more than 300 were fitted with eyeglasses. Seventy-eight were treated for early stages of glaucoma.

"There's 78 people who won't go blind this year," Westfield said. "Glaucoma is irreversible. Once it's blinded you, you can't undo it. But if you catch it early enough you can control it. A number of them have (already) gone blind.

"Cataracts we can fix it in any stage," he said. "You take somebody who is led in, you operate on them, they come back the next day, you take the patch off they can see."

"Forget ophthalmology, forget the eyes," Westfield said. "Women are still dying in childbirth there.

"Going over there once a year is fine," he added. "But we want to get local (doctors) to go there in between our visits. That's the end point. We're trying to build relationships with them. (But) the truth is, they're busy trying to stamp out disease in Port-Au-Prince to go up there."

Changed his life

Westfield said he is thinking of taking on fund-raising efforts in Las Vegas.

"It kind of gets you," he said. "Once you get over there you see the need and the good you can do. I never thought I'd be this involved. My life's not been the same since the (first) trip over."

The humanitarian missions are nothing new to Westfield. The Las Vegas resident of 21 years traveled to Congo (formerly Zaire) in 1986 to perform cataract surgery on the residents and to teach the surgery to American and European doctors working there. Since then he has traveled to Peru and Mexico on similar missions.

"It's a different way to see the world and learn the world," Westfield said. "The thing that keeps me going back to Haiti is that Lascahobas is relatively isolated up in the mountains. When we go there and treat for cataract or glaucoma there's not another (eye) doctor that will come for another year. And it's not just eye care, it's that way for everything.

"Mexico -- there's always someone to go there. It's close. There's a waiting list to go on that trip. Haiti -- there's such a tremendous need. Nobody else will go."

Also, there is an ophthalmological mystery to unravel in Lascahobas, he said.

Macular degeneration is typically found in people over age 65. It's the leading cause of vision loss in the United States, he said. It's also common in other parts of the world. "For some reason we haven't seen it in Lascahobas.

"Last year we did the first study," Westfield said. "Everyone over the age of 40, we dilated their eyes and looked for it. One person had it but he was from the Dominican Republic. We found other retinal problems but not this one.

"We're going to do a preliminary study. I think it's going to be a combination of things, racial predilection, dietary differences, environmental things. They don't eat a lot of red meat. They don't smoke. Their body fat is zero."

Westfield speaks little Creole, the language of the village. He exercises commands during surgeries and appointments using phonetically designed cue cards. But knowing the language isn't entirely essential.

"No matter where you go," he said. "The one thing you can recognize is gratitude -- in any language.

"I've got it made," he says jokingly, referring to those in the village who tell him he has a place in heaven reserved for him.

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