The old man dabbed his eye with a worn handkerchief, crusted from days of use. Rita Denny, RN, spotted him wedged next to his daughter on a bench at Hospital de la Familia in Nuevo Progreso, a town in the mountains of southwestern Guatemala.

"I could see he was in terrible pain," Denny said. "Two semesters of medical Spanish didn’t help much, but I knew enough to ask what happened, and to get the interpreter."

The 80-year-old man had been picking coffee beans two weeks earlier, when a branch snapped into his eye and tore his cornea.

"In 20 minutes, we had him on the table," Denny said. "Without surgery, he would have gone blind or lost his eye."

Denny met her patient in April during an eye-specialist medical mission to Nuevo Progreso, through the Hospital de la Familia Foundation based in Berkeley. She accompanied her son Kevin, a San Francisco ophthalmologist.

A team of volunteers, led by Lee Schwarz, MD, came to Nuevo Progreso, a village 50 miles from the Mexican border in the state of San Marcos, via a bumpy eight-hour bus ride over the mountains from Guatemala City.

Unemployment in the region is as high as 50 percent. Some people work on coffee plantations, while others squeeze a bare living from the land. About 2,500 live in Nuevo Progreso, in faded wooden houses.

Kevin Denny, MD, finds the trips rewarding. "We see a lot of congenital cataracts there. People carry children and walk for days to get the help they need. It’s amazing, the difference we make. We see it right there in front of us."

Volunteers, including nurses and technicians, stay for two weeks, donate their time and live in simple on-site housing. More than 1,000 volunteers have participated in this program, most of them from Northern California.

Guatemala suffers the constant aftereffects of civil war. Volunteers wear scrubs at all times to identify themselves as part of the medical mission. People of the area appreciate the clinic and often walk for miles to receive treatment.

Kevin Denny participated at Hospital de la Familia three years ago after co-workers told him about it. Last-minute health problems prevented his mother from joining that team, as planned.

When Rita Denny’s father had a heart attack that left him an invalid, she was only 4 years old. Even then, she knew she wanted to become a nurse when she recognized how her father had benefited from weekly visits by a cousin who was a nurse.

"My father came from Quebec, and had to leave school after third grade. He wanted me to be a doctor. He’d say, ‘You could run the whole show!’ But I wanted to take care of people," she said.

The Denny family spoke French at home, and she considered working overseas as a Maryknoll missionary. She married straight out of nursing school and had three children in three years; she now has a total of six.

"I still worked in the labor and delivery room every week. Some people had their bridge night, but I liked to work labor and delivery. It was such a happy place. I did that right up until my fourth child was a toddler.

"When the hospital changed their scheduling rules, I had to give that up. My husband’s work had him traveling all the time, and there wasn’t really any question back then, with four kids at home."

For the last 25 years, she has worked with a family practitioner in Brookfield, Wis. Now in her 70s, Denny continues to work part time.

She never gave up her desire to perform international service. "Since my son was in medical school, we talked about working together on a medical mission." She said with a laugh, "Of course, he convinced me that we didn’t have to go where they speak French. And he learned Spanish. That really opened things up."

The team that went to Hospital de la Familia in April did not include an anesthesiologist, so they performed surgery with nerve-block injections and oral Valium. At first, Denny was concerned that she lacked extensive surgical experience, as did the other nurses on the team. "They were all going a mile a minute," she said. "But other things needed to be done, and I found them."

She recalls how she held the hand of a 14-year-old girl and kept her calm while Kevin Denny removed a thick cataract from the patient’s eye. "I kept thinking that she could have been my granddaughter," she said, "only my granddaughter wouldn’t need to work sawing plastic without safety glasses.

"When we removed the bandages the next day, the girl could see her mother and all of us. We were all smiling and crying. It was a wonderful moment. I was glad to be part of it. We had an opportunity to make an impact in this place, these lives. And Ido it again, if ever I got the chance."