Group to Offer Optometry Services in Vietnam : Volunteers: Anaheim woman will join five eye specialists at one-day clinics in five towns in her native country.

Chau Nguyen never thought her job as a newly graduated optometrist would be a dream come true.

For the 29-year-old Anaheim woman, the dream does not entail landing a high-paying job in Beverly Hills. Instead, it has more to do with her being chosen to travel to Vietnam with a group of veteran eye specialists from America to provide free health care there. She will be leaving Sunday.

At a time when visitors to her birthplace bring back news of overwhelming poverty, Nguyen has been eager to return to help.

“It’s like going back to meet an old lover who stood you up,” said Nguyen, who along with her family left South Vietnam in 1975 when Saigon fell. “You’ve been away for so long. You’ve been deprived of growing up in your own land. It’s like going back to call in a debt.”

The project is sponsored by Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity. The group was founded in Kansas in 1972 as a nonprofit organization that sends help to Third World countries where eye care is limited. The California chapter conducts three trips annually, said William Lenon, an optometrist in Santa Clara and director of Asian affairs for the chapter.

The six optometrists, including Nguyen and Lenon, will visit five towns in southern Vietnam where they will set up one-day clinics. All are paying their own air fare and donating their services.

They are taking with them nearly 5,000 pairs of eyeglasses prepared for different prescriptions; $60,000 worth of medication and several optometric instruments, Lenon said. The group has an agreement with the Ho Chi Minh Eye Center for any needed surgery.

“Their equipment is old-fashioned by our standards, but they’ll get the job done,” he said.

The group expects to see about 300 patients a day.

Nguyen read about the project last spring in a trade newsletter while preparing to graduate from the Southern California College of Optometry in Fullerton.

Lenon said Nguyen is the only Vietnamese native in the group.

“I thought it’d be a good opportunity for her and she would be an asset to the group because we’ve never had a Vietnamese doctor with us before,” Lenon said. “And she will have plenty of people around to consult so she will learn a lot.”

After the group’s work is finished, Nguyen plans to stay two more weeks to visit her relatives. She will see her old house and school in Chau Doc, a town southwest of Saigon.

“I can’t wait,” Nguyen said, smiling broadly. “I’m so excited.”