Project Phongsali: Visually impaired villagers don’t know why they are losing their sight. WHWV will try to find them proper care.
This elderly man brought his blind son to Sop Houn in the hope that we might be able to provide treatment. The young man went blind following a high fever in childhood that might have been malaria.
Day 55
Karen and Jerry are getting some excellent interviews and photographs. I’ve made Yai available to serve as their interpreter, but that offer expires within hours, as Yai departs later this afternoon for a two-day trip, via local buses, to the city of Oudomxai, capital of Oudomxai Province.
Yai’s guiding three visually impaired villagers to an eye clinic that opened a year ago, with the support of an Australian NGO (non-government organization). I hope that the folks he’s taking to the clinic will be placed on a waiting list for eventual treatment by one of the clinic’s two physicians, who are currently receiving training in Vientiane and Thailand.
If the villagers’ needs exceed the training of the Lao doctors, having their names on a census list of the blind will increase their chances of receiving services should ophthalmologists from America, Europe, or other overseas locations come to Laos on a medical mission. Often, when that kind of opportunity presents itself, the sponsoring agency in Laos will put out a call for patients and the slots fill quickly, on a first-come-first-served basis. If these three villagers remain unknown to the people in the urban medical centers, they will be forever passed over for service, since word of treatment opportunities will never reach their village via public announcement in Vientiane. Their only hope is to already be on some agency’s contact list.
Vilasack has the team working behind the schoolhouse, constantly shooing away inquisitive children. The team will clear the high traffic areas around the school this coming weekend when the students are gone, and the schoolyard expansion parcel can’t be cleared until the teachers combine windrows of cut brush and create wider work lanes. If the teachers complete that task on Saturday, we might finish the school project this weekend. That assumes, of course, that we don’t encounter any items in the schoolyard that require demolition.