It’s now Monday morning and the international workshop on Childhood Blindness is just about to start. Over the weekend, people from Nepal, Cambodia and Uganda have been arriving, but the Ethiopian person is missing.
Since the KCCO office was closed on Saturday and Sunday (though Drs Courtright and Lewallen seemed to work the whole time anyway!), Mollie and I rented a car and hired a driver and went up to see the waterfalls at Kilimanjaro. The contrast between the dry plains and the lush mountainside is amazing. Our local guide immediately impressed me when, within one minute of setting off to the waterfall, he reached up to an overhanging branch and gently plucked a 1 ½ - inch chameleon from the leaves. Remarkably, he did this twice more during the day, finding a large horned female and a bright green male.
Yesterday (Sunday) Mollie and I explored Moshi and in the evening we were invited to join a special dinner in honour of a visiting team of ophthalmologists who are occuloplasty experts from the US. They are here at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (also home to KCCO) to teach the doctors about plastic surgery of the eye and this week will perform surgery on a series of patients and pass on their skills.
Tomorrow, Mollie and I will not attend the workshop, but will take the opportunity to join Patrick and the team to go to the field and see the trachoma work. We will be traveling to a Masai area where trachoma is endemic.
More soon. Heather
