LAGUNA HILLS : Eye Doctor to Aid Patients in Armenia

In two weeks, Dr. Roger Ohanesian will make his third trip in a year to Armenia to treat eye disorders of the injured and sick of that war-ravaged country.

But the Laguna Hills ophthalmologist’s journey will be more than a medical mission of mercy: It will also be a return to his ethnic roots.

“I have not been terribly Armenian in my life, said Ohanesian, 53, a second-generation Armenian-American. “I don’t go to church. I don’t speak the language.” But visiting the country has “awakened something in me. . . . There’s a great feeling that you’re helping, and that you’re helping your own.”

Ohanesian’s grandparents came to the United States around 1900, fleeing the pogroms in their native land. Setting their sights on a new life, neither they nor their American descendants ever returned to Armenia.

Then, in September, 1992, Ohanesian responded to a call from the Armenian-American Medical Assn., asking him to take his surgical and teaching skills to the tiny nation torn by five years of war and desperate economic hardship.

What he found was a New Jersey-size country whose supplies of food and fuel have been all but cut off by its warring neighbor, Azerbaijan, and its centuries-old border enemies, Turkey and Iran. In the capital city of Yerevan, electricity was turned on only a few hours a day, bread lines stretched two blocks, even at midnight, and armed skirmishes broke out in the streets.

“When I was there, the lights would go out and you’d be standing there with your instruments in the eye,” Ohanesian said. “And then you’d hear automatic gunfire outside in the street.”

Nonetheless, on his first visit he stayed a week, spending 16-hour days under generator-lit surgical lamps, repairing eyes ripped by shrapnel or impaired by disease. Often his work served two purposes, to save a patient’s vision and to teach doctors the latest surgical techniques.

Ohanesian, founder of Harvard Eye Associates in Laguna Hills and a teacher at UCI Medical Center, said that since Armenia declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1988, its doctors have been cut off from learning the latest techniques in ophthalmology, which they used to learn during trips to Moscow.

Still, he said, he was impressed by how quickly and thoroughly they absorbed his teaching.

Ohanesian had taught a group of doctors new procedures on his initial visit last October. “When I went back in May,” he said, “they were all doing them, and some of them better than me.”

On that second visit in May, Ohanesian brought with him $500,000 in medical supplies and equipment, most of it donated from pharmaceutical and medical-supply companies.

When he departs Sept. 2 on his third trip to Yerevan he will again be loaded down, this time with more than $1 million in donated supplies ranging from surgical masks to laser machines.

“With this shipment of medical supplies and equipment we should have almost all that we need in high-tech items that will make this as modern as any American-style eye center,” he said.

And, on this trip, he will have special company.

His parents, who are in their 80s, and his sister insisted on making the trip with him. It will be their first visit to their homeland.