Gumo

Monday, June 7th, 2010 3:20 PM
Tamale, Ghana – Mariam Hotel Restaurant

Today is day two of work via village outreaches. Originally set at 7:30 AM as a start time, we actually didn’t go until 10:00 AM because the driver Azees was essentially a no-show. Though the volunteers were ok with lounging around the UFS volunteer house napping or reading a book, I’m sure the other UFS staff were extremely frustrated that Azees didn’t notify them ahead of time that he would be busy with other matters. Camil, the staff member that took us from Accra to Tamale, ended up taking us to the village after getting a call from Dr. Wanye. The village of Gumo is only about a 20 minute drive from our house and located relatively within town still. As such, the town seemed a bit more affluent compared to the previous town that we had visited. We again started by visiting the chief and getting his blessing before going to work. This chief offered the team a colio nut, apparently used as a symbol of welcome and we’re happy that you are going to serve us.

According to Ali, Christian, and John, the nut tastes horrendous and required a couple cherry fruit snacks to ease the pain. But David said that after eating a couple of these nuts, you sort of get a nice caffeine high from it.
You could view it as unfortunately or fortunate, but since we had gotten to the village so late, most of the people had returned to the farms after waiting hours for us. So the day was very slow as people trickled in literally one-by-one throughout the four hours we were there. However, despite the low amount of people, there were actually more cataract cases this time as compared to before. I got to see a couple of them, as well as learn how to use a simple ophthalmoscope.

I was also able to do refraction today. Since we only have glasses that account for positive refraction (aka reading glasses), we only took in patients that were diagnosed with presbyopia. Although most were done with little difficulty, there were some patients that couldn’t even pick out a chart to read when we offered them either English or Arabic, which made for either a hilarious predicament or frustrating situation, depending on the mood I suppose. The process of refraction involved putting on these funky glasses with slots on them, and inserting lens with various powers until the person can successfully read the smallest text. It’s usually a one-person job, but having help from a second person who gives you and puts back the lens into the huge box-briefcase made it easier. But all in all, it was a joy when the patient cries out in surprise that they could read the smallest text when we finally narrowed it down to the correct lens. After issuing a pair of glasses with the same power and offering them the chance to pay 1 cedi for the service/glasses, they we on their way. One particularly interesting case was a man who claimed he could read the smallest font size after trying out all sorts of powers. After essentially blinding issuing him a pair of glasses, he later traded the glasses for a pair of sunglasses!, and left the area. David, “Oh my God guys, we should like, totally start this organization called Unite for Fashion! So what if everybody’s blind, at least they’ll look totally hot. (in his fake American sassy tone)”

We ended the day around 3 PM. It was certainly a great balance of hard work, dinking around, and enjoyment from the smiley children in the village. The rest of the day was spent making a visit to Mariam Hotel for some internet, and then doing a surprisingly hard workout as a group using Claire’s “30-day shred” video. It’s not appealing to be sweating about three hours AFTER the workout has been completed, but at least we got some physical activity as a group.