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SYRACUSE - Five Wawasee High School students will have extraordinary stories to share when they return to classes today. Their stories will be of Queretaro, Mexico, and the Lions Club Eyeglass Mission that took them there.
Queretaro, a city of about half a million people, is capital of the state of Queretaro. It is perched on Mexico's central plateau and boasts opal and amethyst mines. In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed there, giving up all Mexican territory north of the Rio Grande River to the United States. A few years later Maximilian was shot there by Benito Juarez, and in 1917 the Mexican Constitution was drafted there.
The students who traveled to Queretaro were struck by the wonderful people they met, their friendliness, their kindness and their gratitude. They also were struck by the neatly kept parks, monuments and city center. None remembers seeing abject poverty.
Paul Clerkin was the only young man on the trip. Was he glad he went?
"Oh, yeah! I loved everything down there - my family, the people and the food. It was awesome," he said.
Clerkin stayed with a family that had four children, two at home and two who were grown and living on their own. The father owned eight dry cleaning shops, which allowed them to have two maids. Clerkin never made a bed or washed a dish on the trip.
By 8 a.m. each morning the children were at school, and Clerkin arrived at the clinic, where he helped Lions Club members fit needy persons with donated eyeglasses. The students helped translate for the Lions in testing and picking glasses to fit prescriptions.
By 2 p.m., the teen-agers were released from their duties and were free to enjoy Mexico. Clerkin was especially impressed by the 72 arches that support the six-mile-long, 50-foot high aqueduct.
"A man's wife was living in a temple, and he built the aqueduct so that she could have water from a lake in the mountains," he said of the structure built more than 200 years ago by the Spaniards.
He remembered to bring pure vanilla home for his mother. It's one of the must-buy items on any Mexican trip. He also bought woodcarvings and the usual souvenirs. Clerkin's family sent him home with a jar of "cajeta," a caramel spread that is very tasty.
Kristi Rosbrugh's shopping trip took her to a market, where she was almost run over by a man carrying on his shoulders "a whole cow" ready to be butchered. She also saw whole fresh fish and other foods unusual to someone who normally shops in American supermarkets.
"It was like nothing I had ever seen before," she said. "Peddlers on the street sold whatever they had made."
She will remember Queretaro for her first taxi ride. "They are crazy drivers," she said, laughing.
"I didn't want to come home. I loved it. The people were especially friendly. I wish I were still there," she said.
Andrea Sands said she spoke a lot of Spanish and thinks she did pretty well, "but it was hard to understand them. They speak so fast."
She remembers Bernal, a 500-foot-high monolith weighing nearly 4 million tons.
At the clinic Sands did everything from running the auto refractor (the machine that give the prescription) to picking. She said the Lions took more than 26,000 pairs of eyeglasses.
About 7,200 people were officially fitted with eyeglasses, and the rest were left to be used later, according to Nance Heimann, Spanish teacher who was on her first Lions Club Eyeglass Mission though she had been to Mexico many times.
In 1975 Heimann taught English in a mission about 40 minutes from Queretaro.
"I've done mission trips before, but this was the most rewarding I've ever had - enabling people to see, especially the elderly and the very young," she said. One woman told her she used to read the Bible, and Heimann pointed out that with the glasses she would be able to do so again.
"The people have next to nothing and they are so grateful," she said, noting that the Mexicans are very generous and she was pleased to be able to speak with them to hear about their lives.
Other WHS students who went on the trip were Amanda Jeffery and Valerie Mock.
Syracuse Lions Club members James Cameron and his wife Fran lead the Lions Club Eyeglass mission trips each year, enlisting the services of Lions from throughout northern Indiana.
The eyeglasses they take are donated to the Lions Club. They are cleaned, measured and catalogued before they are taken.
