So Laura and I spent most of yesterday with Sight for Africa's outreach team. Our destination: a wood market in a poor and predominantly Muslim part of Accra. Many of the men filing through to have their eyes checked were laborers, mostly carpenters; there were wood chips in their hair, and sawdust lining the grooves in their ears. The day before we got there, someone had walked around the market announcing an eye clinic the next day, and word had spread. Upwards of 70 or so people showed up, mostly in a trickle, though sometimes there was a surge, and often there were onlookers trying to figure out whether or not to approach (and whether or not to reach through the fence to touch Laura and me). It was a tiring day but super interesting; we got to listen to each person describe their symptoms (often in Tre, so that required some translation) and sometimes look into their eyes to see for ourselves what cataracts and inflammation of the cornea and dead eyes look like. A mechanic came in with blinking eyes turned completely red from hydrochloric acid. Many people complained of itchy eyes and headaches from the dust and dirt that is always carried in the air around here (right now in Accra, the air is opague and filled with dust because of dry winds blowing down from the Sahara; you wouldn't believe the stuff we're blowing out of our noses). Cataracts were plentiful, and so unfortunately was glaucoma: the clinic folks told us that something like 1 out of 10 Ghanaians over 50 develop glaucoma, which left untreated degenerates to blindness. Maybe a dozen people who turned out for the clinic were learning that they had glaucoma for the first time, which made it hard not to think about all the people who didn't show up and what they might have wrong with them, which is probably more or less the thought that drives the entire clinic.
The equipment the team had transported out to the market was pretty basic: about 10 plastic chairs, a plastic table, a glaucoma machine (which shoots a poof of air into the eye to measure pressure), and two basic eyecharts: one with English letters and one with smaller and smaller rows of capital Es, so that people who can't read can look at the E and indicate with their hands which way the spokes are pointing. There was also, oddly enough, a massage chair and a woman running one of those big mutli-bumped vibrating massager gadgets across the backs and shoulders and legs of people whose complaints extended past their eyes. That was kind of a weird sight - Muslim men in traditional dress or women wrapped in kente cloth, sitting and leaning forward with their faces pushed down into the cushy ring thing of the massage chair.
This morning we spent some time hanging out at the main clinic itself, following patients as they ran through various tests. It's a great cause, and the clinic is doing great work - most of their services are free, and people who have the means to pay still pay no more than $10 - but it's also got some strange complexity to it. The clinic is much more Christian-focused than we'd initially though, with glossy posters of Christ featuring slogans like "Jesus never fails" hanging everywhere, even over the eye chart. And a few of the clinic workers hold opinions about Muslims and their "cleanliness" that we both found a bit troubling, but this is certainly not the case with Kofi and the leaders of the clinic. They are as open-minded and all-embracing as people come. So it's a weird mix: a place that's doing great work but has a complicated worldview, perhaps, although for sure there is no question that "eyecare for all" is the top priority. It'll take a few days to process all of this, I think.
So I might blog one more time on Sunday, before I embark on another Afriqiyah Air extravaganza (Laura's sticking around for a few more weeks). But continuing on our trip theme of "the more bizarre, the better," it looks likely that we're going to be attending a Ghanaian funeral tomorrow morning, and tonight we might be sitting ringside at a bigtime boxing match. A former featherweight world champ from Ghana is coming out of retirement, or some such; his manager came into the clinic yesterday in search of new glasses, and offered up some tickets to Kofi. We're not sure he'll follow through, but if so then we're off on another sporting adventure. I loathe boxing, but the offer is sort of hard to resist...
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