Reaching Over 1000 People

This week was extremely busy for me so this post might be a little long. On Tuesday and Wednesday we had an eye camp for the elderly. At the eye camp we gave out about 150 pairs of glasses and medicine and the doctors performed 30 surgeries on people with cataracts. We screened over 300 people. It was awesome to help so many people. My specific job was to give patients the medicine on their prescriptions and give them their glasses. They were so excited, even this one lady started crying when she put on her glasses. I even got to see a cataract surgery, which was probably one of the coolest things I have seen. This is a picture of me checking in the people who had surgeries on the first day.


Then on Thursday we had a football tournament in a rural area about 2 hours away from where we are staying. The tournament included 6 primary schools and 2 secondary schools came just to play a game against each other. In between each tournament game we had trainings for things like Leadership, HIV/AIDS prevention and saving for the future. It was so fun how much the kids like football, every time a goal was even blocked they went wild. When someone made a goal they went crazy. Everyone would run onto the field and do flips and cheer for like 5 minutes at least. Also our HELP team played a game against a local woman’s group at the end and it ended in a tie. Afterwards, we gave each of the schools at the tournament a football because they cannot afford them but they love football.
Lastly, on Friday we had a dental camp at a primary school. We screened almost a 1000 children and extracted about 900 teeth. The children would get checked on by a dentist assistant for any obvious cavities and then sent to a room to wait to be numbed and then be numbed on the other side of a slab of wood separating the numbing room and the waiting room. After they were numbed they would be sent to another building to get their teeth extracted. I was in the room with the children waiting to be numbed and it was horrible because the children being numbed would scream at the top of their lungs because the needle hurt. So it was my job to distract the children by entertaining them. It was probably the hardest thing I have done here though. It basically broke my heart hearing the children screaming. I think I did a good job of entertaining the children by singing and dancing. Even some of the children that didn’t have cavities were trying to sneak in the room, they did not realize what those children were waiting for.