First Day of Work

Friday, June 4th, 2010 6:19 PM
Tamale, Ghana- UFS Volunteer Guest House

Today was the first day of official volunteer work. After about a forty-five minute drive with a quick stop for snacks in the middle of the drive, we arrived at the village of Nankonkurugu. Originally feeling very ill-prepared as we had no planning whatsoever before going to the village, many of us were slightly worried as to how we were going to organize the multitude of people that desired to get their eyes checked. But once we got there, things seemed to be all right. My first impression of the villagers was nothing like I thought it would be. Especially noticeable were some of the children, which had shirts that were ripped halfway down the middle and some without shirts had the part of the belly button area stick very way out. When asked if it just something of a traditional measure, it was not so. Originally very wary of us, both kids and adults alike stayed quite a distance away from us. However, just because they were at a distance didn’t mean that there weren’t A LOT of them standing at a distance. At first, with all these eyes staring at you with sometimes blank faces, some of us got a little bit scared, but after a while… we tried to shrug it off and continued with our work.

Before we could start any work, we had to go talk to the chief in his hut to get his approval and his blessing. We were instructed to just say “Naaa” to anything that he said, so it made for a pretty hilarious two-way conversation. He individually talked to each of us for about 15 seconds, but probably took a minute on Claire. His frequent smiling and tone of voice indicated that he especially liked her. And later on, would say that in his younger years, he would have liked to have a nice, pretty white girl such as her. But now that “his penis doesn’t wake”, there’s no point now.

We then left the hut, with my final impressions of the hut as a small, fly-infested, area with some random drums and items above us held with a sort of straw material.
We started the day by filling out templates for identification cards, something we should have done yesterday so we wouldn’t be wasting time doing that, but we had no prior preparation or notification from Ali, so we made due. After, we set up five stations. Three were devoted to taking eye acuity via the E-charts, one was the eye refraction station, and the other was a diagnosis “dark room” station in one of the huts. I was in one of the E-chart stations, and helped take eye acuity measurements of kids as small as six years old (a couple were wearing Barack Obama shirts… haha) to as old as sixty or seventy years old. Some things I learned about the culture just doing eye acuity checks was that you had to be very careful around the old women, even if they don’t quite understand what they’re supposed to do. One time, I tried touching the hand of one of the elderly woman and bring it to her face to cover one of her eyes, and she immediately moved away from me. Another thing was that everyone appreciates a smile and an effort to try to speak their language, Dagbani. Whenever I tried to say “change your eye” (tama nimbla), I got a roar of laughter from everyone who could hear it. But it was always followed by smiles, so I guess I’ll take a little bit of embarrassment as a compliment there.

Some odd events that I didn’t expect was a herd of DONKEYS that suddenly entered the eye station premise and ran around for 10 seconds or so and then stampeded off again. John gave an excellent metaphor of a motorcycle gang coming in to make an appearance in front of a small town. And thus the donkey stampede was coined “the donkey motorcycle gang.” Speaking of donkeys, two of them stampeded a little bit later after the initial herd and trampled a boy of probably 4 years old. Literally, trampled the little guy. I’m surprised that he survived. Sorry I don’t have a picture as proof. It happened so fast.

We ended the very exhausting day around 3 PM, and after a light dinner of chicken fried rice and veggies, I crashed from 7:30 PM to 8:00 AM the next day.