Unite for Sight in Chennai!

This was originally posted from India on January 28, 2009.

So! Besides traveling around Delhi and visiting Pongol celebrations, I bet you are all wondering if I have actually done any volunteering...

In point of fact, I have :)

A typical day here in Chennai consists of waking up at about 7:30 am, getting ready for the day and then heading to Hande Hospital to observe cataract surgeries. The amazing thing about the surgeries is that the head doctor, Dr. Varman, makes it look easy. After a while you start to think it is all the same. In fact, he is the fastest cataract surgeon in the hospital, able to finish a surgery in 7 minutes. We usually see about 4 in half and hour.

After surgery we head to camp, and that's where most of the fun and the best pictures come from.

Here you see our volunteer opthomolgist resident (far right) next to an Indian residency student. I'm the nearly bald guy next to the Indian opthomologist and the fellow in the yellow shirt is another volunteer. The third volunteer and I are handing out glasses and recording who got glasses.

The kids LOVE seeing foreigners come through.

The weirdest thing is that we keep getting congratulated. In this picture I'm getting thanked by a church with a towel. This picture was before I got a haircut and a shave.

Also at the church. We pay 200 rupees for every camp we go to (the volunteers) which pays for the gas for the van and for our lunch which we always end up eating with our hands. There is a trick to it actually: you pick up the food with your fingers as a spoon and push it into your mouth with your thumb...I am not demonstrating that in this picture.

A happy customer.Volunteers looking cool in the free shades we brought. The guy in the middle is our driver, Mr. Mutu. He is the resident badass.

After camp we sometimes go to the clinic to watch the doctors work. I'm not a medical student so I usually leave that time to the other volunteers. We don't help around the clinic as much as we do at the camp and they are generally really busy.

However, we did get a chance to do some surgery on a goat's eye!

Of course, as impressive as this may look, I am not destined to be an opthomologist. It was a good thing the goat was dead, because I ended up stabing the eye through the iris. Oddly enough, that didn't prevent me from finishing the surgery, as the lens is under the iris. But it would have screwed the goat for life.

The place where we did the goat's eye surgery was in a great location. They do not use pig eye, though.

Of course, being me, going to camps, watching surgeries and harming innocent goat's eyes is not enough. I also took it upon myself to clean up the office where the eye clinic stored all the free glasses everyone donates.

BEFORE:

AFTER:


Of course, one of the issues we have had to deal with is a disporportionate amount of glasses donated.

The picture above is of the +1.00 and +1.25 power reading glasses we have for passing out. When the optomotrists hand out glasses, the age of the patient is a huge determining factor, and many people we see fall into the +1.00 and +1.25 range. Unfortunately, we don't get as many of these glasses donated as we need.

We DO however get just about everything else! The box on the far left is +1.75 (btw, this picture is taken AFTER Thanraj, the volunteer coordinator, and I cleaned up and reorganized). The next box is +2.00. The box on the ground below it is also full of +2.00. After that is an empty box of +2.25, then another double set of +2.5, empty +2.75 and then two full boxes of +3.00 and +3.25 which are off the right side of the picture.

Now, when giving out reading glasses it is acceptable to go up or down +0.25 on a prescription, so not having +2.25 and +2.75 is really not that big a deal. According to the opthomologists, there isn't even that big a difference between +1.00 and +1.50.

But empty boxes bother me so I emailed the head of Unite for Sight and now the website has a note for all future :

Eyeglass Note: Uma Eye Clinic has an abundance of eyeglasses with a
prescription of +2.00. Please do not bring +2.00 glasses. Instead, the clinic
needs +1.00, +1.25, +2.25, and +2.75. Additionally, Uma Eye Clinic needs
negative power glasses, but remember not to bring any glasses with a cylinder
prescription (See Instructions For Collecting Eyeglasses for details)

Sweet :)

My final project was to try and get a survey done of the patients who got cataract surgery done so UFS would have some more statistics on their overall impact. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish but there is a chance that my fellow volunteers can carryt he tourch :) Good luck guys!

Anyway, I'm typing this as I'm about to go to the airport and head to Mumbai! NO time for editing!