Everyone in the clinics stopped and stared when the 6ft tall
mazungu (white person) went running across the hospital grounds shouting ‘stop
her’. Cheri Butt, a Newfie transplanted to Mississauga, on her 6th
trip to Kenya, has been running the vision clinics with equal parts efficiency
and fun. Between 200 and 300 patients each day funnel through the vision
clinic, most hoping to get reading glasses, some coming for distance testing,
some extreme cases requiring referral for cataract or other surgeries, and for
the remaining few, sunglasses or a hat. Most people suffer from eye problems
because the fire in the center of their huts produces great amounts of smoke
and the dry red dirt paths they walk on are dusty.
After the patients see the Kenyan optometrist and get tested
for reading glasses (if they are over 40), they go to our distribution center
to receive the prized spectacles or a hat, most likely from Islander Marjorie
Gallant. As the quality of donated glasses we received this year improved
tremendously, (through a generous donation from Vogue Optical), a few patients
are becoming pickier. Typically when you hand the pair of glasses to the patient
and they put them on, suddenly able to see clearly for the first time in years,
their whole face changes. They point out trees off in the distance or the
sharpness of your face. One person, a pastor, from my first trip to Kenya even
exclaimed that he could now read his bible again, no longer needing to preach
only from memory.
On the day the clinics paused, however, the raucous was
caused by an eighteen-year-old girl who was picky and persistent. As the story was
told to me, she was given glasses, left, and came back to try to exchange them.
To keep the clinics running efficiently, Cheri asked the girl to leave as she
was given the correct prescription also because she was not our typical
destitute client. This girl could afford to buy her own glasses. A short time
later, Cheri found the girl poking her head through the window trying to have a
secret conversation with the Kenyan volunteer, and again Cheri chased the girl
out. Shortly later, she saw a different Kenyan volunteer with a pair of glasses,
walking out of the clinic. When Cheri saw the volunteer deliver the glasses to
the girl, Cheri was not pleased. She immediately chased the girl down the hilly,
rocky clinic to the front gate, shouting for someone to stop her.
The lone Kenyan security guard standing at the gate (his
coworkers at lunch), was holding the wrought iron gates shut, keeping the
people out that were already seen in one clinic hoping to go to another, or
were just curious about the wazungus (group of white people). As the girl came
running through, our security guard chased after her, leaving the gates wide
open. All the people flooded in.
It took 45 minutes to regain control of the grounds. This
involved walking up to each person, asking them through a translator why they
were there, sadly telling them the doctors were full, then escorting them at a
sulking, slow, sauntering pace to the gate. We did this for every person. You
would think after people saw the same process for the first 10, or even 20
people, they would give up and leave, but no. We had to go to every person and
individually explain the situation, encouraging them to come back early in the
morning.
The girl was never
found and we had a rumor start that someone’s wallet was stolen (the ‘only’
explanation for a white person to run across the clinic). All of this over a
pair of glasses!
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