Our final vision clinic

Today saw our team head in three different directions. Tom and Mark conducted day 1 of pastoral biblical training for 26 Kenyan pastors at the Tumaini conference center.  The construction crew headed back to Gituamba to install fencing around the school facilities. And the vision team headed back to Bahati region. Unfortunately, we got back to Tumaini so late (8:30 pm) that I was not able to get information or pictures for the other groups. I’ll try to report on their activities tomorrow. 

The vision team went to the Jomo Kenyatta Boys High School to (theoretically) do vision screening on the 90 students we were unable to see when they came to our clinic in Bahati. However, they sent everyone who had vision issues, so we ended up screening 144 students. We started at 9:30 and finished at 3:00, two hours after we were to have started seeing patients at the Bahati hospital.  We quickly broke down our computer and networked autorefractor and printer and headed to Bahati. Within 45 minutes, we were up and running again. We ended up screening 90 additional patients there, ending exhausted at 7:30 pm after seeing 234 patients in total. We distributed more than 150 pair of glasses.  Because our clinic was free and available to all, we saw lots of patients with serious eye issues. Most prevalent were keratitis, severe dry eyes, glaucoma and cataracts. Because of Dr. Chris expertise, he was able to dispense medications provided by Rotary and to refer patients for further treatment at hospitals or a surgical eye team that will be coming through Rotary in January. 

All in all, the eye clinics were a resounding success. Over the four days of clinics, we saw 759 patients, prescribed and fit over 400 of them with prescription glasses and provided nearly 200 pair of reading glasses. The seeds have been well planted for a continuing vision program in SWOK that future teams will carry on. And we feel that we have grown immensely in our knowledge of how to run such a program. Each day, it took the efforts of over 20 people to do check in and initial vision screening, examination, patient advocates to take them through the vision testing of pairs of glasses and efforts by screeners to keep the nearly 2000 pair of glasses organized. It was a herculean effort that involved not only our team and SWOK staff but Rotaract members as well. And the added challenge of dealing with another language just added to the complexity of the task. But it was more than worth it! Not ever case was a success, and some of the patient conditions were heartbreaking. But the smiles on the faces of our success patients were priceless!