Mobile Eye Clinic

This past week I was able to travel with some of the Tenwek eye team to a small town for the mobile eye clinic. The mobile clinic happens about 3 times a week, where members from the eye unit travel to a nearby or semi-distant village to screen people for eye disease. The patients that gather are seen in a dispensary (or small clinic) in the village and are given eye medications and reading glasses and are screened for eye disease that requires surgery. If patients require surgical care, they are given the option of traveling back with the team to Tenwek, having the eye surgery, and are given transportation back to their village. It is a really neat ministry. The clinics usually see many patients and bring a large number of patients back with them. This past week we had about a 13 hour day traveling to the village of Lesos, about 3.5 hours away. The roads were very bumpy along the way, but the scenery was so beautiful, that I didn't mind. We traveled through much of the tea fields that supply Kenya and other countries with chai. The fields were amazingly well-kept, and it was interesting to see the workers in the fields gather the tea leaves.
We had a steady stream of patients that visited us to be screened for their eye conditions. We took 4 patients back with us to Tenwek on the bus for them to have eye surgery. During our trip back to Tenwek, we stopped at a town, and a bunch of kids saw me (the lone white person) through the bus window. They were screaming, pointing at me, and they ran to the bus door. They started filing into the bus to shake my hand and called me the M'zungo (white person). It was quite funny!
It was a great day to see how the Tenwek eye team reaches people all over Kenya.

The dispensary where we held the eye clinic.

Two of our eye team members screening helping to screen vision and visual fields.

I'm screening for the red reflex for this mother and her son inside the dispensary.

Screening vision using a Kipsigis chart.

A man gathering tea in the fields.

The beautiful tea fields.