Ahsan Khan smiles as he tells this story, clearly one of his favorites from four years of doing medical missions to a remote region in Guatemala. This ophthalmologist ... works at Kaiser Permanente ...
Source/Credit: Orange County Register
By Samantha Dunn | January 6, 2014
A belief in serving others leads Ahsan Khan to help poor people in Guatemala regain their sight, and to spearhead blood drives at home
Dense cataracts had robbed the Mayan villager of her sight for much of her life. When at last she was able to see her husband’s face for the first time in 30 years, she eyed the wrinkles on his skin and exclaimed, “My God, you’ve gotten so old!”
Ahsan Khan smiles as he tells this story, clearly one of his favorites from four years of doing medical missions to a remote region in Guatemala. This ophthalmologist who works at Kaiser Permanente in Yorba Linda says the 500 surgeries he performs here a year can’t compare in gratification to the dozen or so he does on his yearly missions. “These people haven’t seen for years, and they are so poor, and a lot don’t even speak Spanish. I don’t even understand what they are saying, but their expressions are universal.”
He says it’s hard to describe just how profound the simple act of removing a cataract can be. “In Guatemala, families are very close knit, so if one person is disabled or blind, the whole family is occupied with this person, caring for them. So if you give vision to one person, another person’s life is freed up.”
But Ahsan doesn’t want to give the wrong impression. His name in Arabic might mean “the best,” but Ahsan is the first to insist he’s far from that. “Just ask my wife,” he says. “She always tells me, ‘No, you’re not.’’”
True, the 37-year-old did come up with the idea to start the Gift of Sight medical mission to Guatemala four years ago, to a village where the Ahmadi Muslim humanitarian aid organization, Humanity First, is doing philanthropy projects like digging wells.
True, through the program he mobilized, dozens of poor Mayan villagers blinded by cataracts have regained their vision, and the program is expanding this year to double its impact. More money is coming in, and more surgeons and support staff from around the country are enlisting to volunteer.
Ahsan will just say, “Look, there are many, many other programs that are bigger and reaching more people,” ticking off a list.
And then he’ll tell you about all he did wrong in his first efforts to get the program going – how after a factfinding trip he was so daunted at the challenges that he lost faith he could do anything. “I had nothing to start with, just me – how am I going to do this?”
But he heard of others who wanted to do a medical mission and they signed on, then big optical companies, most of which are centered in Irvine and Santa Ana, got wind of his idea and donated to the cause, boxes and boxes suddenly showing up at his home in Fullerton and at his office. Soon, even his three little children were helping Daddy organize the donations – the two-year-old being in charge of stickers. Says Ahsan, “It’s by the grace of God, just one thing fell in place after another.”
After that, Ahsan will tell you about everything he did wrong on his first trip – how he didn’t plan for the rain, or the electricity going out. He didn’t realize medical equipment has to have special customs clearance, so the $30,000 portable cataract machine he’d been loaned was almost confiscated. And then here was the problem of the roads.
“I get motion sick, I can’t drive on windy roads. This place is three hours through the mountains. I didn’t know that.” Ahsan shakes his head, laughing at himself. “I’m throwing up. It was a mess.”
Get the picture? A dentist might be better at interviewing Ahsan, not a journalist, because getting him to take credit for anything is like pulling teeth. “My brother is humble almost to a fault,” Amjad Khan chuckles over the phone from his law office in Los Angeles. “He’s the kind of person who never takes credit, who is in the background completely. He gets it from our parents, definitely.”
The Khans’ parents came to this country in the ‘70s from Pakistan, where their Ahmadiyya Muslim community faced – and still faces – persecution by the government because its beliefs differ from mainstream Islam. They believe the Messiah already came in the 1800s, in the form of the India-born leader, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Ahmadi Muslims also believe that the true meaning of “jihad” refers to an internal struggle, rather than waging war. Their motto is, “Love for all, hatred for none.”
Ahsan was born in Oregon and his family eventually settled in Chino Hills. He graduated from UC Riverside and UCLA, but it was during his residency at Loyola University in Chicago, that his life was changed by returning to Pakistan for a mission, where his aunt has dedicated her career as an obstetrician to serving the poor in a remote village.
“You see people who are helpless, who have never seen an eye doctor, who come in tattered clothes, and are walking barefoot. You do a little thing – I mean, cataract surgery takes about 15 minutes, in my hands back then maybe a half hour to an hour – and they start seeing,” Ahsan explains. “They have tears in their eyes. They have nothing to give but they are praying for you, trying to do a trade in some way.
That moved me. I saw my aunt in action and I was like, this is incredible, and yet I am going back to the U.S. and just become a doctor and make money while she is doing this essentially for free.”
That’s when he decided that he would find a way to do medical mission work.
Then 9/11 happened. For this baseball-loving, U2-listening American Muslim, the peaceful messages of the faith he grew up with suddenly had more urgency.
“My wife and I were at Wrigley Field for a Cubs game the night before,” he recalls. The weather was so cold he got a chill so called in sick in the morning, only to turn on the TV to see the planes hit the towers. “Suddenly I’m getting calls saying, why did you miss that day? I remember coming back the next day – I was working at a VA hospital – and the same guard who would see me every day, who knew me on a first name basis, was like, ‘Open your trunk.’ I never faulted anyone for that. It was a very sensitive time. I am American, I was born here, I was so embarrassed because I couldn’t believe what was going on here, especially as an Ahmadi Muslim, where violence is antithetical to everything we believe in. The challenge was, what do we do now?”
One response from the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has been the national blood drive campaign, Muslims for Life. Ahsan serves as president of Los Angeles East Chapter based at Baitul Hameed Mosque in Chino. In 2013 they collected 1,200 pints of blood “all in the name of saying we are fellow Americans who stand by the Americans who died on 9/11,” he says.
Adds his brother Amjad, “Ahsan believes there is no better explanation of your beliefs than through your actions.”
Contact the writer: sdunn@ocregister.com or 714-796-6892
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