Last Week With Crystal

Saturday June 6, 2015

The Somanya kids and I right before I fell over. 

Just 2 weeks left! Time has flown by! It was the beginning of our lasts. This was our last week with crystal eye clinic and it was a blast! I love crystal so much, I am going to miss them a ton. What was great about this week was it was almost the same as my very first week here. We got to go back to Teshie and the refugee camp. I saw some familiar faces and got to speak Ga again in Teshie. There is a school at the church that we were holding our outreach at Teshie and the kids were so funny! They loved playing with us, especially if you lift and throw them around. Except when you do it to one child everyone wants a turn, which I knew would happen. What I didn’t know would happen was how they were all literally jumping on me to the point where they made me fall over. But then they helped me up and brushed the sand off my legs and feet. They were so sweet. Probably some of the happiest kids I have met since I have been here. That was on Monday June 1. 

Tuesday were were back at the liberian refugee camp. It was pouring rain all day, so much that St. Thomas cancelled their outreach because of flooding in the area they were going to. No day off for us though. What was nice was that all the visual acuity tests were done when we arrived so all we needed to do was dispense the medications and glasses. We finished quite early. So we ended up going to the Art Centre one more time. I got a few more souvenirs and gifts which was good because there were some other things that I wanted and also I knew how to barter with the shop owners. After we met up with the rest of our group at the mall, had dinner and saw Pitch Perfect 2. Not as good as the first one but I still enjoyed it. 

Mary! She was so cute! She did this sweet little
dance after, it was so funny. 

Wednesday we were in a place called Somanya in the Eastern Region. One of the patients there was 100 years old! She wasn’t the oldest person I had met on the outreaches but she was definitely the fittest. She didn’t look much older than 80. Today there was more rain, I am used to the periods of rain. It is the rainy season however. It has rained a lot the past few days, so much that there is flooding in parts of Accra. Ernest said that flooding happens every year. What was different about that night was what we found out the next morning from John. 

John told us that there had been an explosion at a gas station in Accra at around 10pm. There were over 100 confirmed deaths! No one has ever heard of anything like that happening. I asked him if he knew how it happened. He said the news was reporting that it started from a generator close by falling over causing the gas to leak out into the water. The men that tried to recover the generator were smoking. One of them threw their cigarette into the water and it caught fire. Quickly it caught up to the gas station and-BOOM. Very sad that something so little could cause such damage. What made the situation even crazier was Johns side of the story. That day we had dropped him off as we came into Accra so he could take a trotro (a sort of cheap bus) back home. If he would have stayed with us and gone home from the Telecentre he would have passed right by the gas station around the time it exploded. He was definitely being watched over. We don’t normally drop him off in random places but that day we did, and for that I am grateful. 

Yours truly.

Thursday was our first time ever going to the Crystal clinic! I loved it! It is smaller than the St. Thomas clinic but the smaller atmosphere is nice. Dr. Clark, the Ophthalmologist is really nice. For some reason I was really tired that day so I ended up sleeping for 2 hours at the clinic after my surgery rotation. 

Myself, Jarome, Marissa, Evan, Rachel, John, Alyssa, Mary, Esther, BB and Ernest in front.

Friday was our last outreach with crystal ever! Sad day. We were in an area called Kibi in the Eastern Region. Afterwards the local volunteer had cooked us chicken and rice. It was probably the best chicken and rice that I have had here. I will always remember those guys. Ernest, John, Bismarck, Jerome and Dennis. I had a blast with them and I will never forget all the great laughs we shared and the things I learned from them. Maybe someday in the Future I will see them again.