After a six-hour ride to Kumasi from Accra, we arrived to our residence of two weeks. It's the guest house of Dr. Wanye, a local ophthalmologist. He's been doing surgeries in a more northern city called Tamale for the past couple of days, so we didn't meet him upon arrival. But he gets back today so that'll be nice. Anyway, we've been doing essentially the same thing we've been doing in Accra. We've been performing visual accuity tests for the locals as well as dispensing medicine for those who wish to have it. We set up our station at about 7am. Where we work just depends on where they need us. Then we work until about 1pm when the inflow of patients slows down substantially. While we work, we help those who one by one until no one comes. That usally happens around 1pm. One unique thing about my experience here, though, has been shadowing the working optometrist. When he does basic check-ups for patients, he uses a retinal scope to look into the back of the patient's eyes for any abnormalities. And he has two scopes. So he let us use one to look into the back of patients' eyes. It is so cool to experience something like that first-hand. At first it was a little tricky to focus the scope because the hole you look through is about a millimeter wide. But whatever. Over the past two days, I've looked at over 200 people's eyes (which makes that about 400 eyes.) It's been awesome.
This week we worked at two primary schools and the communities surrounding those schools. It's been nice to see the welcoming faces of the students. Kids are great.
Overall, this week has been awesome. The staff is great. The locals are awesome. And to be quite frank, Ghana is a dream. I love it here. Helping out had been such a great experience. I'm so glad I still have four weeks to go.
These are some of the students we looked at.
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