BY KIRSTEN HOLGUIN
UCLA Today

This month the Small family — Kent, wife Frances and daughters Natalie and Leslie — will spend almost 20 hours traveling to Vanuatu, a group of 83 islands located east of Australia and west of Fiji.

This is not, however, your typical family vacation. The Smalls are not going as tourists. They are a family on a mission — a medical mission.

Kent Small, director of the Macular Disease Center at the Jules Stein Eye Institute, used to dream of taking a year off to sail around the world, stopping in remote locations to perform eye exams and surgery on people in need. He thought it was something that would have to wait until his children were grown.

That didn’t stop Kent and Frances Small from encouraging their daughters to volunteer, and the girls have responded by playing the violin at local nursing homes and feeding the homeless at shelters.

Last summer it was Natalie, 17, who put the pressure on her dad to look into a medical mission for a vacation. After doing some research, Small gave the family two choices: Thailand as tourists or Bali as medical missionaries. The decision to go to Bali was made at the last minute while the family rode in the car on the way to the airport.

“This type of experience helps families appreciate what they have and how they can contribute and make a difference for an individual or a community,” Small said. “It’s a great opportunity for my family and me to give back a small fraction of what we have received.”

Frances, Natalie and Leslie, 13, all agreed that Bali was a little disappointing because they didn’t get a lot of hands-on medical experience. That wasn’t the case for Kent, however, who found the Balinese population to be consistent with the original indigenous population. It proved to be a good location to study genetic eye conditions, including one family suffering from congenital cataracts.

The benefits of embarking on a medical mission are obvious to Frances. “It gives the kids a chance to see what their dad does on a more personal level,” she said. Staying with the director of the mission program in Bali also gave the girls the opportunity to learn about the Balinese culture.

“It is totally different than being a tourist,” Natalie said. “Working with the people, you get to know and understand them better than you would as a tourist.”

As was the case in Bali, the natives of Vanuatu have rarely, if ever, seen a doctor. So the family expects to be busy. While Kent performs eye exams and cataract surgery, his wife and daughters will be taking patients’ medical histories, preparing them for surgery and changing bandages.

“A medical mission is more difficult to do with children,” Frances declared, “but it’s worth it.”