Ophthalmologist operates on hundreds of poor people overseas. Next stop: Vietnam.
Laguna Beach woman sees America through new eyes because of her work.
By VIK JOLLY
The Orange County Register
Comments 0 Recommend 1
LAGUNA BEACH – It wasn't much really, a half pound bag of peanuts.
But the peanuts had come for Diana Hope Kersten from halfway around the world. And she understood the significance of a gift so small.
A few months before, the Laguna Beach ophthalmologist had traveled with a New York-based nonprofit group to perform free cataract surgeries in Mali's capital, Bamako. Now, a phone call informed her that a present had arrived in the mail.
The woman on the telephone from New York shook the box and said it seemed to contain nuts. The carton smelled of peanuts, she added.
Kersten knew instantly who the gift was from: Mama Camara, the matriarch of a family, a woman in her 60s in Bamako, whom Kersten had operated on and befriended.
The token of appreciation was her way of thanking Kersten for repairing her vision. Mama Camara cultivated and sold vegetables at the market. She must have noticed the American doctor's penchant for the locally grown staple.
It has been 20 years since those peanuts arrived in the mail from Bamako. But the decades have not diminished the impact of the gesture for Kersten.
"This is a woman who probably had never mailed anything in her entire life and she had to go greatly out of her way to do this," said Kersten recently, wiping a tear from her eye. "It was so adorable and generous."
This is the kind of gratification that Kersten has been rewarded with over the years she has volunteered to perform hundreds of cataract surgeries in about 20 countries.
This is why she will take two weeks off from her San Clemente and Laguna Hills medical practice and finance another mission later this month.
She could stay in the comfort of her Laguna home with an expansive view of the Pacific Ocean, but Kersten will leave on Friday for Hue in Vietnam to help mend the eyesight of 50 people she has never met, in a country she has never seen.
ROMANTICIZING KENYA
Kersten grew up in Iowa City, a college town where her father was a podiatrist and her mother an elementary school teacher.
The Midwestern city with its medical school and her activist mother shaped her adolescent years at a heady time in history. Her mother, Beverly Full, took her to rallies. Student protests against the Vietnam War rocked the campus. In 1968, 11-year-old Kersten shook hands with presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy.
Her parents divorced when she was 12 and her brother was 10.
Her mother helped push local school boards to adopt Title 9, the 1972 federal legislation that brought gender equity in education programs. Kersten dropped cheerleading and took up volleyball and gymnastics.
She spent many summers with her cousins playing in the sand at Shaw's Cove in Laguna Beach, a city that would become home in 1988.
She went to medical school in Iowa, interned in San Francisco and ended up at Harvard Medical School in Boston for her three-year residency.
All the while she was influenced by the stories she heard about her best friend Heather Furnas' travels to Kenya with her father, David, a plastic surgeon. In 1970, he did reconstructive surgeries in rural areas with the Flying Doctors Service of East Africa.
For years, Kersten romanticized Kenya. Then, for two months in 1982, while finishing medical school, she traveled to the East African country to assist in cataract surgeries. A small plane took her over lush tree plantations and over the Great Rift Valley.
She saw people with river blindness caused by a parasite. She saw people with glaucoma and cataracts. Their needs made her understand what a difference a doctor can make.
She was 25 and hooked to the excitement of travel and aid work.
A WORLDLY VISION
After her residency, she volunteered for two years in Africa and Asia. Among other countries, she worked in Nepal, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sarajevo, Athens, Cyprus, the Sudan, Nigeria, Mali, Tunisia and Malta. She helped perform cataract surgeries from the back of a 1957 DC-8 donated and she operated at hospitals, where long lines of patients formed daily.
In 1988, she got a job with a group called Harvard Eye Associates, with offices in San Clemente and Laguna Hills. She moved into an apartment in Laguna, then with her husband to a bigger home a few years later.
Her journeys leave her exhausted, but reinvigorated.
"I don't think you can go on one of these trips and not see that people are the same all over," she said.
The relative ease of getting health care and timely medical intervention in America is an advantage that those she sees in developing nations lack. Often eye diseases fester to a point of becoming untreatable. In many parts of the world, there's one ophthalmologist for a million patients, she said.
Her last three trips – to Burma, Laos and Mexico – have been with Surgical Eye Expeditions, a Goleta-based nonprofit.
After many years, she is still drawn to a portrait she took of a family in Nepal: A man wears sweater ripped at the seam, and his daughter leans over his shoulder. The mom in this family needed cataract surgery, so the whole family packed lentils and rice for the long trip and camped outside the mountain hospital where Kersten operated. The family epitomizes the hundreds who trek for days to the free surgery clinics, she said.
Her journeys have also made her view America through a different prism. While she appreciates the opportunities and the promise that America holds and is grateful to have been lived here, she also sees a stressed and over-caffeinated society.
"It has made me regret a sweetness that our culture maybe has lost that I find in some of these primitive cultures," Kersten said. "Living in a civilized world is very complicated."
Since her son Lucas was born seven years ago, Kersten's overseas missions have slowed down. But her passion for international ophthalmology hasn't lessened.
Vietnam will be her second trip since Lucas' birth. Her husband of 12 years, Mike Austin, a chief financial officer for small health care companies, and Lucas will join her for the second week of the journey. During the first week, Kersten will help local doctors perform 50 surgeries on prescreened patients.
The trip, she and her husband hope, will also be the beginning of a global education for their son.
"We really have an obligation; we have to give back to the world," she said.
Eventually, Kersten says she would like to pick a corner of the world to set up an eye hospital, toward which she would funnel resources and pour some of her post retirement time and energy.
Laguna Beach woman sees America through new eyes because of her work.
By VIK JOLLY
The Orange County Register
Comments 0 Recommend 1
LAGUNA BEACH – It wasn't much really, a half pound bag of peanuts.
But the peanuts had come for Diana Hope Kersten from halfway around the world. And she understood the significance of a gift so small.
A few months before, the Laguna Beach ophthalmologist had traveled with a New York-based nonprofit group to perform free cataract surgeries in Mali's capital, Bamako. Now, a phone call informed her that a present had arrived in the mail.
The woman on the telephone from New York shook the box and said it seemed to contain nuts. The carton smelled of peanuts, she added.
Kersten knew instantly who the gift was from: Mama Camara, the matriarch of a family, a woman in her 60s in Bamako, whom Kersten had operated on and befriended.
The token of appreciation was her way of thanking Kersten for repairing her vision. Mama Camara cultivated and sold vegetables at the market. She must have noticed the American doctor's penchant for the locally grown staple.
It has been 20 years since those peanuts arrived in the mail from Bamako. But the decades have not diminished the impact of the gesture for Kersten.
"This is a woman who probably had never mailed anything in her entire life and she had to go greatly out of her way to do this," said Kersten recently, wiping a tear from her eye. "It was so adorable and generous."
This is the kind of gratification that Kersten has been rewarded with over the years she has volunteered to perform hundreds of cataract surgeries in about 20 countries.
This is why she will take two weeks off from her San Clemente and Laguna Hills medical practice and finance another mission later this month.
She could stay in the comfort of her Laguna home with an expansive view of the Pacific Ocean, but Kersten will leave on Friday for Hue in Vietnam to help mend the eyesight of 50 people she has never met, in a country she has never seen.
ROMANTICIZING KENYA
Kersten grew up in Iowa City, a college town where her father was a podiatrist and her mother an elementary school teacher.
The Midwestern city with its medical school and her activist mother shaped her adolescent years at a heady time in history. Her mother, Beverly Full, took her to rallies. Student protests against the Vietnam War rocked the campus. In 1968, 11-year-old Kersten shook hands with presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy.
Her parents divorced when she was 12 and her brother was 10.
Her mother helped push local school boards to adopt Title 9, the 1972 federal legislation that brought gender equity in education programs. Kersten dropped cheerleading and took up volleyball and gymnastics.
She spent many summers with her cousins playing in the sand at Shaw's Cove in Laguna Beach, a city that would become home in 1988.
She went to medical school in Iowa, interned in San Francisco and ended up at Harvard Medical School in Boston for her three-year residency.
All the while she was influenced by the stories she heard about her best friend Heather Furnas' travels to Kenya with her father, David, a plastic surgeon. In 1970, he did reconstructive surgeries in rural areas with the Flying Doctors Service of East Africa.
For years, Kersten romanticized Kenya. Then, for two months in 1982, while finishing medical school, she traveled to the East African country to assist in cataract surgeries. A small plane took her over lush tree plantations and over the Great Rift Valley.
She saw people with river blindness caused by a parasite. She saw people with glaucoma and cataracts. Their needs made her understand what a difference a doctor can make.
She was 25 and hooked to the excitement of travel and aid work.
A WORLDLY VISION
After her residency, she volunteered for two years in Africa and Asia. Among other countries, she worked in Nepal, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sarajevo, Athens, Cyprus, the Sudan, Nigeria, Mali, Tunisia and Malta. She helped perform cataract surgeries from the back of a 1957 DC-8 donated and she operated at hospitals, where long lines of patients formed daily.
In 1988, she got a job with a group called Harvard Eye Associates, with offices in San Clemente and Laguna Hills. She moved into an apartment in Laguna, then with her husband to a bigger home a few years later.
Her journeys leave her exhausted, but reinvigorated.
"I don't think you can go on one of these trips and not see that people are the same all over," she said.
The relative ease of getting health care and timely medical intervention in America is an advantage that those she sees in developing nations lack. Often eye diseases fester to a point of becoming untreatable. In many parts of the world, there's one ophthalmologist for a million patients, she said.
Her last three trips – to Burma, Laos and Mexico – have been with Surgical Eye Expeditions, a Goleta-based nonprofit.
After many years, she is still drawn to a portrait she took of a family in Nepal: A man wears sweater ripped at the seam, and his daughter leans over his shoulder. The mom in this family needed cataract surgery, so the whole family packed lentils and rice for the long trip and camped outside the mountain hospital where Kersten operated. The family epitomizes the hundreds who trek for days to the free surgery clinics, she said.
Her journeys have also made her view America through a different prism. While she appreciates the opportunities and the promise that America holds and is grateful to have been lived here, she also sees a stressed and over-caffeinated society.
"It has made me regret a sweetness that our culture maybe has lost that I find in some of these primitive cultures," Kersten said. "Living in a civilized world is very complicated."
Since her son Lucas was born seven years ago, Kersten's overseas missions have slowed down. But her passion for international ophthalmology hasn't lessened.
Vietnam will be her second trip since Lucas' birth. Her husband of 12 years, Mike Austin, a chief financial officer for small health care companies, and Lucas will join her for the second week of the journey. During the first week, Kersten will help local doctors perform 50 surgeries on prescreened patients.
The trip, she and her husband hope, will also be the beginning of a global education for their son.
"We really have an obligation; we have to give back to the world," she said.
Eventually, Kersten says she would like to pick a corner of the world to set up an eye hospital, toward which she would funnel resources and pour some of her post retirement time and energy.
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