Donating Eyejusters in South Sudan, Part One

Let me start off by apologizing for taking forever to get this post up. I won't go into all the reasons I could give to justify this delay. We have so much to show and tell, so I have decided to divide it up into several posts. This makes the task of organizing all our footage and telling the story in a good way feel somewhat less daunting for me :)


I won't give you a day-by-day play-by-play of our trip. Quite frankly that would probably be of little interest to anyone other than my mother - Hei Mamma! :)


This post will mostly be about project planning.


As I have mentioned in previous posts we were partnering with East African Ministries to provide glasses in the area of Kajo Keji in Central Equatoria. EAM is the umbrella organization for the Radler Foundation's three East African initiatives: Water Harvest International, Mobile Health International and Leadership Development International. 


Kristen Hansen works for EAM and was in charge of coordinating our efforts (Kirsten and Kristen, that was pretty confusing... :)). She is so friendly, sweet and funny and great at her job! 


We had 270 pairs of eyejusters as well as 300 pairs of reading glasses to donate*.

Norma (middle), Opoka (right) and I (left) carrying the eyejusters out of the car. Opoka drove to the Ugandan border to pick up the glasses. Twice! The first day the bus carrying the shipment had broken down on the way and got delayed. When Opoka got back to the compund on the second day he told me: "Again and again I drive over there for nothing..." I almost started crying :) However Opoka can't keep his big smile in for very long. I was pretty relieved :)

We only had a week in South Sudan so to make the most of our time there we decided it would be best to prioritize training the local staff to dispense Eyejusters. They would be more efficient than us because most of them speak the local language. Also, there was no way we would be able to dispense all the 270 pairs of eyejusters in less than one week, so it was very important to make sure they would feel ready to take over when we left.

Training!

That was a pretty easy job :) They are very bright and really fast learners.

Kirsten the guinea pig :) Lars explains the near vision test to (from left) Violet, Richard and Gloria.

Kristen and I shot some film of Richard, Gloria and Violet practising. I have tried editing it, but this is my first time using iMovie so don't expect anything fancy :)

Gloria wearing her eyejusters

Kristen, Lars and I worked exclusively on testing vision and dispensing glasses. The rest of the people we trained on the MHI and WHI teams alternated between their regular duties and donating glasses.


Lots of love, K


* To clarify, we always donate eyejusters on behalf of our customers, the cost of the reading glasses for this project was covered by Lars and I personally. This is because we want to make sure the eyejusters go to people who really need that technology. A lot of people over the age of 40 just require a simple pair of reading glasses.