The Village of Hope

Howdy!

I know it’s been a while since I last wrote, but although the Telecentre claims to have wireless internet, what it really should claim is that it has wireless internet . . . occasionally. The internet is down way more often that it’s up, and every time I try to get my e-mail on Thunderbird, I hold my breath to see if it will go through. What this means is that a lot of these posts have been written days ago and saved in Word until that magic moment when we have a small window of World-Wide-Wonder. In fact, as I write now, the Web is down. Maybe it will be of some help for me to tell you that I’m writing on July 7^th, my BG’s birthday!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BG!!!!

Well I have a ton to write about, and I think I’m going to go backward. Right now, today is fresh in my mind, and last week in Tema is a dull and unpleasant memory. This post will be about today, then I’ll work back through our great weekend, and then I’ll say just a little bit about last week.

As the title of this post suggests, a number of us spent today in the Village of Hope. This place was a school/church/orphanage in Ghana’s Central Region, about 2 hours from Accra. The school was for all grades, primary through secondary school (aka K-12) and was full of many students from local villages. However, a large population of students at the school were also orphans who primarily lived at the refugee camp not far away. Some of these orphans were lucky enough to live at the school with any of 9 different foster families (a married couple and a few orphans). The Village of Hope looked like a tiny college campus – there were a good number of buildings, and they all served different purposes. Nurseries, classrooms, chapels, residences, lecture halls, and offices were inside some of the buildings that we saw. It seemed like an amazing place for any lucky student to be!

Today was particularly interesting for us as volunteers because we were doing a different type of outreach than we were used to. Instead of dispensing eyeglasses and medication, we dispensed knowledge! Our role was to provide an approximately 90 minute presentation to the first through fifth graders, and then another similar presentation to the JSS (junior secondary school) students afterward. When I learned what we would be doing, I was so excited to get to be a teacher for a day!

In preparing our presentation, we broke down the speech into the following topics:

1. Introduction to Eye Health and Unite for Sight

2. Anatomy and Functions of the Health Eye

3. Vitamin A Deficiency

4. Refractive Error

5. Conjunctivitis

6. Pterygium

7. The Sun and the Eye

8. Eye Trauma

9. Glaucoma

10. Cataracts

Topics 3-10 are all common diseases of the eye (minus number 7) and in each of these sections, we included symptoms, causes, prevention, and treatment. There were 7 volunteers and 1 nurse on this outreach, so the nurse did the introduction and each volunteer got one disease. However, I got to present 2 diseases because there were one fewer of us than there were diseases. I prepared to talk about conjunctivitis and cataracts.

After we prepared, the woman in charge of health education at school lead us to the lecture hall. We sat up front in chairs while at least 200 students, first through fifth grade, filed into the hall. In order to made the filling process more manageable, the students filed in while singing a song – “We love you with the love of the Lord.” One lucky fifth grader had been picked to lead the singing and the procession. Every student was wearing a blue and white uniform with closed toed shoes. Then, as soon as everyone was seated, a man who seemed to be in charge stood up front of the hall, asked everyone to bow his or her head, and said a prayer. He prayed that the students would be able to hear the message that we were bringing that day so that they could learn to protect their God-given gift of sight. It was a practical and beautiful sentiment. Then, it was time for us to speak.

The ophthalmic nurse, Robert, did our introduction. He talked about UFS and had each of us stand up to tell who we were and where we were from. It didn’t take long for him to see that these students were going to need constant engagement to keep their attention. This wasn’t because they were poorly behaved, but simply because they were young. You could see their eyes losing focus after only a minute of un-engaging speaking. So, Robert had them play a game to illustrate the effects of blindness on how a person can live life. He pulled a boy and a girl from the audience. They kids introduced themselves, blushing madly, and Robert took a tootsie pop from his pocket. He put the pop on the windowsill and said to the boy, “Find the toffee.” As expected, the boy went over and picked up the candy, grinning. But then, Robert blindfolded the boy, put the toffee on a different windowsill, and said, “Ok, find the toffee now.” As the blindfolded boy stumbled around, the whole lecture hall giggled wildly. It was a good thing that he was a good sport. While the boy was still blinded, Robert instructed the girl to help the boy to find the toffee, since she could see. She took him by the hand and led him to the right sill where he finally clutched the toffee in his tiny grip. The whole group laughed and applauded, and the blushing boy and girl returned to their seats with their tootsie pop prizes. Then Robert explain why this demonstration was so significant. When you are blind, you cannot do even the simplest tasks, and your blindness becomes a burden on not just you, but your whole family. Your family has to guide you in all your simple tasks, and they often have to do this at the expense of doing other things like going to school or doing their work. In this way, a blind family member is a burden on a family and on a community. I thought this was a very very effective way to begin our presentation.

I was about fourth in line to present, and I watched the other volunteers talk about eye anatomy and a few eye diseases. The other volunteers seemed to be having a bit of trouble in keeping the attention of the 200+ eyes in the audience, and I resolved to do better. When I stood up to talk about conjunctivitis, I asked the kids to say “conjunctivitis.” They giggled at how funny it was to say. Strangely, the locals call the disease “Apollo,” so when I told them that this funny word conjunctivitis was the same thing as Apollo, they grinned. I had a student stand up and tell me how you can tell if someone has Apollo, and I game him candy when he said, “The person will have big eyes, and they will be red!” Then I elaborated a bit on other symptoms. I always introduced a new topic with a question to the audience, and they loved to answer questions. It was so hard to pick which wildly-waving hand to call on! Finally, at the end I asked a concluding question to make sure they had been paying attention, and I rewarded the correct answer with a tootsie pop. As far as I could tell, I had really managed to keep the kids’ attention!

A few more volunteers presented their diseases, and then finally I stood up to talk about cataracts. The girl who had presented right before that had talked about refractive error with hyperopia and myopia, so I started my talk by showing the class my glasses and telling them that I was a perfect example of someone with myopia. I took the glasses off, and said, “Well now you all look like fuzzy blobs!” and they thought I was so silly. Then, I talked about cataracts, asking questions all the way, and finally I did a demonstration. I pulled a cute little boy from the audience and explained that having white cataracts is just like having pieces of white paper over your eyes - all you can see is light. So I put white paper over the boy’s eyes and waved my hands around. He giggled because he couldn’t see a thing. Then I shined a flashlight over the paper and he saw the light. It worked really well as a demonstration.

Basically, I loved teaching! One of the other volunteers recorded my cataract speech because I had done so well with my Apollo talk. Even Robert said I had done a really great job. This experience is really making me think that I should consider applying for Teach for America during my time off before med school. I think it’s possible that I have a gift for teaching, and at least from this one day, I thought it was amazingly rewarding.

This has turned into an incredibly long post, so I guess I’ll just say one more thing about the school. This day was the first day where English had been the preferred method of communication with the local people! The kids’ English was great, and they seemed to understand everything we said as long as we talked slowly and clearly. It was amazing to be able to talk directly to the kids instead of speaking through local translators like we usually have to do at outreaches. It is so wonderful that the children at this wonderful school are being taught in English, because English is the key to mobility in Ghana. There are more than 40 different languages in Ghana, and if you count dialects, there are many many more. This often means that a person born a specific village never leaves because people outside the village speak a different language. For the children at the Village of Hope to be learning English so well will be a blessing for their entire lives. They will be able to leave their small villages and will have a good education to help them do whatever they want to do. Being in this place was truly an amazing thing.

When the man in charge asked the kids to thank us for coming they responded in unison, “Thank you and may God bless you.” I echo this sentiment.