A double duty day

We returned to the All Nations Springs of Life Church on the south of Nakuru near Bahati again today. We had done our first hygiene and water filter training and distribution there last week and returned to do both a vision clinic and another filter distribution. We had lost a few of our SWOK university students who had to return for exams or classes, so we were a little bit light on staff today. So we pressed our drivers (and even Rufus' wife Gladys) into service to help out. This made Andi's heart glad, as Gladys is her Kenyan sister! 

 Five of our team went with Dale Plummer, who is the Water Filter Meister Extraordinaire and leads all the filter presentations, and the remaining five oversaw the vision clinic. Because this church is so large and has big rooms, we were able to have both activities going on concurrently in separate areas of the church. The water filter team conducted two large group training sessions and distributed 260 household water filter kits! That will provide clean drinking water for more 1300 people and will have far-reaching benefits in both the health of the users as well as costs of medical care for serious diseases prevented and lost work and school days. Well done, Team Water! 

The vision care team members assembled our clinic in another area of the church. This was the first time we have been able to have all the vision care activities happening in the same room, including vision prescription testing, glasses fabrication, distribution of readers and sunglasses, and the professional evaluation of patients with vision issues by Dr. Chris Williams. We were able to activate an exam laboratory desk-mounted slit lamp that had been donated to us and we brought with us from the US. This helped in doing higher quality eye exams than we had previously been able to do with a handheld unit. We are hoping that our Kenyan electronics technician is able to resolve a capacitor issue with a similarly donated computerized kerotometer that we hope to use when we do our next clinic on Wednesday at the same church. We saw a total of 140 patients and dispensed approximately 110 pairs of readers, at least the same number of pairs of sunglasses and about 75 pairs of prescription glasses. In the examination portion of the clinic, Chris evaluated approximately 100 of the patients who had more serious conditions that needed professional evaluation. Of those, we have five additional cases that we have flagged for consideration of additional treatment and follow-up that we can arrange for them with surplus team funds. We will review all of the identified cases once all clinics are completed and we are able to see how many our available funds will allow us to refer for treatment and surgery.