Hello folks! What a week! I will give you guy a quick walk through day by day. On Monday we had our first outreach. Most of our work here will be in outreaches where we travel to various parts of Ghana with a team of nurses and doctors to screen people's eyes. Each clinic has specific areas they visit monthly. This means that they are able to not only identify and treat eye problems, but they are also able to follow up each month with those who receive treatment of some kind.
This week I was working with the Crystal Eye Clinic. Our first outreach was in Teshie, just down the road from an area I served in as a missionary called Nungua. People in the community gathered to a local church building (which has been the case in all of our outreaches thus far) to register for an eye screening. We arrived around 9am and finished around 6:30pm. Myself and three other volunteers helped out with visual acuity tests where the individual views a chart from a specified distance to assess how well they can see. With the system they use here perfect vision is not 20/20 but 6/6 because we use a distance of six meters for the acuity tests. We saw about three hundred people at this particular outreach.
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| The awesome group I got to work with this week. |
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| This is the crowd we found waiting for us inside the church building in Teshie. |
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| This kids hung out with us through much of the day. We had a blast drawing, pretending to do eye exams with each other, and chasing each other around. |
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| This is Christabelle. She loved riding on my shoulders and tried to climb up me all day. |
On Tuesday we visited a refugee camp in the Central Region of the country. Here everyone was waiting for us in the shade of a large tree. This group was smaller than the previous day with a little over a hundred people seen. When we have a break from doing visual acuity tests we can shadow the nurses and doctors as they examine people's eyes. Occasionally they will pull us over to show us a particular case. Jerome, one of the nurses, showed me a case of glaucoma where one of the patient's pupils did not contract when a light was shined on it. We also see a lot of cataracts everyday. It is heartbreaking to know that so many people have been living with impaired vision without treatment.
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| This is the group at the refugee camp. We met a lot of incredible people here. |
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| Here is a picture to give you a better idea of what our visual acuity tests look like. |
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| This was an adorable baby. This is how most mothers in Ghana carry their babies. These women are incredibly strong. |
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| This was one of my good buddeis through most of the day. He kept running over to me to sit on my lap. |
On Wednesday we visited a village in the Eastern Region. The scenery was beautiful and the people we saw only added to my love for this village. We saw close to 200 people here. When we introduce ourselves we use Twi, the most common language besides English spoken in Ghana, and the people love it. Once we had finished doing evveryone's acuity tests I played some soccer with a bunch of kids who seemed to have no end to their energy. I also started picking up two kids at a time and spinning them in circles. They LOVED it and they literally swarmed me to try and get a turn. As the sun set and the air cooled down I looked around and felt like I had found a slice of heaven. I kind of felt an urge to build a little house there and start a farm. It was awesome.
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| The group waiting inside the church for us at this outreach. |
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| Thsi was how we set up our acuity tests for thsi day. This is the party van we use to get around. |
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| This is the outside of the church building we used. It looked like it had been around for a while. |
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| Some powerhouse women carrying goods on their heads at the end of the day. |
That is about all of the time I have for this post. I will get another one up soon with pictures from the rest of our week. Ghana is amazing and I could not be more grateful to be back in my second home. You can refer to just about anyone here as mommy, daddy, brother, or sister indicating that they are family to you. That is exaclty what I consider the people of Ghana.
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