Today was an awesome day, probably one of the most fulfilling I’ve had in seven years of summer mission trips to Kenya. On every previous trip, we’ve had the blessing of doing water filter distribution and the trading associated with it. With waterborne disease such a big contributor to sickness and death in Kenya, bringing clean water to families will definitely change their lives. But the payoff is down the road. We don’t get to see it immediately. We’ve seen the effects of it on subsequent trips and with statistical data. Fewer people are getting sick, missing days of school or work, less money is being needed to pay doctors and pharmacies for drugs to treat waterborne disease, etc. The validated stats on all of these measurements are in the 90+% range of improvement, and our physical observations in these areas also bear out the statistics: the people are healthier. It is most evident in the children we see. So we know we are making a difference.
Today, we saw the start of a new initiative from SWOK and we were able to be the team to introduce it. We set up and ran a vision clinic at the Gituamba village where we have been working on the school, church and homes for the last seven years. And this effort provided instant proof of positive change of lives. This was where the culmination came of a lot of time and effort back home. One week ago yesterday, we received 1500 pairs of random prescription used glasses that we purchased from Kendall Optometry Ministries, Inc., and we added them to several hundred obtained by the good graces of local southeast Pennsylvania optometrists. Several of these doctors welcomed our request to place collection boxes forused glasses in their waiting rooms, and some even donated unused glasses their practice no longer needed. For any of these doctors and their staff that helped collect andthat might be readingthis, we and our Kenyan friends thank you sincerely.
Secondly, I have to thank a group of dedicated friends who pitched in as volunteers. We had no idea how big the task would be to assemble storage cases, numerically tag three different components, barcode scan and pack 1500 pairs of glasses. And we had to print over 5000 labels to make it work and be able to rapidly find the specific pair of glasses a patient would need. Special mention goes out to Lynne Bonaroti, Sandy Peden, Betty Pappas, Jane Heemer, Tom Wolff, and Cindy Dumont, in addition to my wife, Andi Hall. Without these people, we would never have carried this out. Thank you, thank you, thank you!! They put in more than 65 hours over three days to make this happen.
Today was our trial by fire. We had zero time for training before leaving home, and we relied on the training manual from Kendall and their U-Tube videos to assemble the equipment and make it all work. We set it up for the first time at our Tumaini base the night before and succeeded in a dry run. We had to run the autorefractor, computer and prescription printer on a generator today because there’s no power available where we were running the clinic. And it was a great success! We set up a station where “patients” were given a unique tracking number and basic information was recorded. Our patients were students from the school, their teachers and residents of the Gituamba community. We always had a backlog of those waiting, often for at least a half hour. The next step was the inputting of their patient info into the computer and then a scanning of each eye by Dr. Chris Williams to determine their prescription. The computer would then cross-reference this to all the glasses in our inventory, and the patient would be escorted through a glasses fitting and test of the computer’s suggestions. Once they tried a pair that gave them 20/20 or 20/30 vision, we had a happy camper! In all, we tested approximately 100 patients and dispensed over 40 pair of glasses. And some of those who received glasses needed significant correction (as much as -4.50!), so we had some very significantly happy customers! If I can ever get the picture bug fixed in the blogging site, you’ll get a chance to see some satisfied customers!
I have to share one story from the day. This is just another of the long list of miracles I can recount from our previous Kenya trips. And we’ve had them on every single trip! Call them what you want, but there’s no mistaking it, they’re miracles. To begin with, you have to recognize where we were doing this clinic. It’s close to the middle of nowhere! It’s about ten miles off of the nearest paved road, and “unpaved” doesn’t do it justice. It’s puddles and ruts and hills and valleys (oh my!). Our clinic didn’t finish until 6:15 pm, which is just about dark this time of year in Kenya (their winter). We had four Toyota vans (similar to a Volkswagen bus for those of you old enough to remember, but built 50 times stronger) and we hastily packed all our glasses cases, optical equipment (worth nearly $17,000), computers and personal gear in the rear “boot” (hatch back trunk for those who don’t know the Brit term) of each vehicle. By now it was very dark. The last vehicle out was Happy James with Tom, Cindy, Owen Chris and a couple others. No one was behind to see the boot pop open on one of the countless bumps or ruts on the long stretches of narrow track through woods and corn fields. No one saw Chris’ backpack (with more than $4000. worth of personal equipment and electronics in it) pop out! When the boot lid popped open another time and someone heard it, the backpack was nowhere to be found. And a quick jog back several hundred yards turned up nothing. The vehicle was quickly turned around and the crew headed back toward Gituamba. In the next mile, they encountered a man on a motorbike who said he had seen it about another mile back on the road. On they drove for another mile, and still nothing. They came to a hut along the road and recognized a young boy who had been to the eye clinic today, and he hurried the team to his mom. She had been a passenger on a motorbike (their only form of Uber!) and had come upon the backpack! She had put two and two together and had been frantically trying to contact someone by phone who could get the backpack to its rightful owner. Not only had her son been to our eye clinic, but he had received retina surgery through previous SWOK efforts and had even been in the SWOK online video promotion for the major water filter distribution taking place in that region this year. Struggle as you might, I defy you to explain how this isn’t a miracle that only God could orchestrate. As Tom Wolff pointed out at our team wrap up and devotions tonight, “God never just works on one side of the equation”. We can see how He orchestrated the circumstances to get Chris’ equipment back. The other side of the equation is a poor Kenyan woman struggling to just stay afloat. Life is hard in Kenya, every day. She tried to reject Chris’ offer of money for returning his valuable equipment, but she rejected it several times until pressed to take it. And she no doubt desperately needs it. She didn’t intend to receive anything for returning it to its rightful owner, and she never even looked inside to see what treasures it might contain. But Chris recognized an opportunity to complete the equation. May we each look for such opportunities in our daily lives.
Jim
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