Day 3: Dec 20th, 2008- Eye camp in Thiruvallur
The third day, a Saturday morning, I left for Hotel Aasai to meet my fellow volunteers there before they left for the clinic. Two new volunteers had just arrived, MaP (there were so many M’s! :) ) and KE, both undergraduate students, possible pre-med; a little jet lagged but only too eager to begin work. After chatting for a bit, we headed to the clinic and loaded the van with camp supplies. Before setting off we stopped at the office just around the corner where the clinic stored donated eye glasses sorted by prescription. At the office I finally met Thanraj, of whom I’d heard plenty by then, the person in charge of coordinating volunteer schedules, arranging eye camps and pretty much overseeing most of the outreach activities in conjunction with Unite For Sight. (I shall have much to say about this very dedicated person and his tremendous commitment to improving health services in rural India in future posts.) We were each given a welcome packet with information about Uma Eye clinic, offered a mobile phone for the duration of our stay, provided with a schedule for eye camps, and some general information about Chennai. Also included in the packet was a cheat sheet with translations of commonly used words and phrases in Tamil. This proved to be a source of enormous entertainment on our drive to the camp! Jokes aside, its utility cannot be overstated, as A and MP will surely attest to.
What appeared to be a large wedding reception hall (or Kalyana Mandapam) was arranged for the day; a very spacious hall, it had multiple side doors allowing cross ventilation and sunlight to pour in. The camp was a ways from the city in Thiruvallur, in North Madras (or Chennai). The eye camp had been organized by the Chennai chapter of the Lions Club and was part of a larger general health camp that included dental checks too.
The patients screened that day covered a wider age range and included many more men and children than on our first camp. Patients, once registered, had their visual acuity measured, following which they were seen by an optometrist to fine-tune their prescription for corrective eyeglasses. They would finally be seen by an ophthalmologist before moving on to the dentists and general physicians. For the purposes of documenting pre-existing medical conditions that could affect their vision, patients were asked if they had high blood pressure or suffered from diabetes. That day I got to do visual acuity tests for the first time. As many of the patients who came in that day could understand some English, language was not a huge barrier. And I must say, MP did a remarkable job of putting patients at ease with her newly acquired vocabulary consisting of eppadi irukkinga? (How are you?) padikka theriyuma? (Can you read?) seri, padiyunga (Okay, please read), while taking turns with me doing the visual acuity tests.
After seeing a few patients, I noticed that while most did a good job of reading the charts on one eye, from having pressed too hard to close the other it took them a few minutes to focus when they had to read with it next. And so, we made it a practice to ask each patient to only gently cup their hand over the closed eye. And it worked really well! In the process of doing the tests we could also really appreciate just how severely a mature cataract affected vision for some of the older patients; The Snellen chart was really no use in such cases as many of them could barely count fingers held up beyond a foot away! Of course, it took a lot of counseling to educate them on the need for surgery. That test was truly their first step towards seeing differently…

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After the camp was nearly wrapped up, we took turns getting pictures of the children who had walked in after school. P in fact, took a particular liking to a dust bin and upon her request many pictures were duly taken of her with it! :) Just as we began considering our options for lunch, the organizers invited us upstairs; they had arranged for lunch- a generous helping of various rice items, venn pongal, sambhar rice, curd (or thayir) rice and shakkara pongal, all served in shallow bowls made of dried banana leaves!
On our drive back from the camp, we stopped at a Hanuman temple that was still being built. The ginormous statue (or vigraha) was apparently monolithic, sculpted out of granite that was fortuitously found just 2 years ago, jutting out of the ground in a quarry in Karnataka. And the inspired owner had had it transported to Chennai; an incredible feat in itself given there had to be no breaks or cracks to the stone in transit.

A few of us were scheduled to observe the regular patients being tested/treated at the clinic later that evening. And with nothing to do between lunch and then, we thought we would find a coffee pub in Anna Nagar to kill the time. MP even knew where the nearest Café Coffee Day was. So again, we braved the walk from 10th Main Rd to Hotel Aasai; the café was supposedly on the way. 15 minutes into the walk, we had that same sinking feeling of knowing we were going nowhere. But upon MP’s insistence we looked for every red sign on the street. We did find a rather garish looking pink and yellow house, but no red sign. A, a regular chaai drinker by then, dismissed the idea of coffee altogether and walked straight to a convenience store to get her afternoon fix and left us to our wandering. At last we found the big red sign we’d been looking for. Yes, we did. Just on the side road parallel to the hotel too. And it was indeed a Coffee Day chain…with a selection of freshly ground coffee beans to choose from, to make our own cuppa filter coffee with, in the comfort out homes.

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That evening, MP, P and I were shown the use of the Retinoscope. For a frustrating few minutes initially, we could not see any reflex because we weren’t focusing the light right. When we did get it right, we took turns using it on each other and were thrilled to be able to really see the difference between an uncorrected myopic eye and one with normal or lens- corrected vision… Another long day of work, yet one full of lessons and new insight.