Envisioning Care
Image Description: A patient sits in a chair, looking through a phoropter.
The following is a photography series documenting a service trip I volunteered on in 2023, where I worked with a local nonprofit to provide free eyecare services to residents of San Pablo (a city in the Philippines that lies just south of Manila). Looking back, I’m struck by the small, beautiful moments of individualized care that are present in these images. To me, they humanize medical treatment that seems to be rendered increasingly inaccessible in the exorbitantly expensive, business-oriented structures of the American healthcare system. Moreover, as someone who comes from a large family of Filipinx immigrants who have spent their lives serving a predominantly white patient demographic across a variety of U.S. medical fields, I find that there is something uniquely subversive and empowering in seeing Filipinx healthcare workers serve Filipinx communities.
Their work continues to remind me that healthcare really is a labor of love; especially in a diaspora whose labor is so often undervalued, this love becomes even more impressive when it allows us to recenter our medical systems by uplifting our own communities, for a change. And through this change, perhaps we finally will be able to envision a future that protects—rather than profits off of—the beautiful work and care that Filipinx populations have to offer.
If seeing is believing, then to bear witness is to believe in something more. Healing is rarely linear, and it certainly isn’t free. More often than not, recovery comes with a cost, and relief becomes a catalyst for debt. But in the end, true care is something that is given–not sold.
