GREENFIELD — Some days ended in tears as Christa Walling met people with diseases she couldn’t treat or surgeries she couldn’t provide.
People came from miles around with diseases, tumors, after-effects of electrocution — any number of causes affecting their vision. Babies and children waited alongside the elderly.
But most days, the solution to change patients’ lives was as simple as an eye exam and a pair of glasses.
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Walling, an optometrist at Hancock Eye Associates, traveled in November to Nairobi, Kenya, to provide free eye exams and glasses to people through Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity, a nonprofit based in Omaha, Nebraska. Some 22 individuals, including optometrists and family members, traveled to Kenya’s capital city and set up a free vision clinic in a community center in Mukuru kwa Njenga, one of the largest slums in Nairobi, a city of 3.1 million people in eastern Africa.
The group stayed in a hotel in an upscale area of Nairobi and traveled for about an hour each day to the community center in Mukuru, Walling said. A large tent and chairs were set up for people to wait for care, and hundreds of people lined up for eye exams every day, she said.
According to the website of VOSH/International, some 2.5 billion people in the world need glasses because of a refractive error in their vision, and one in seven of those people don’t have access to glasses. VOSH travels the world putting on short-term vision clinics and working to develop sustainable optometry programs throughout the world.
Kenya has one of Africa’s strongest economies, but its health-care system is far behind what Americans are accustomed to. It spends only about 6 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, compared to more than 17 percent in the United States. It also has a shortage of doctors: 0.2 physicians per 1,000 residents compared to 2.57 per 1,000 people in the United States, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Walling saw just how life-changing a simple examination and a pair of glasses can be for someone without easy access to care.
Some 1.5 million people live in the slums of Nairobi, and within a week, Walling’s group of eye doctors saw and treated more than 1,700 people from the impoverished areas surrounding Kenya’s capital, she said.
The majority of the residents who came to the clinic were Christian, Walling said. “There were so many preachers who said, ‘I can’t read my Bible,’” Walling recalled. “I can fix that.”
The majority of cases were that way, she said.
One patient, a little boy named Alvin, especially warmed her heart. Alvin lived with several disabilities, including poor vision and drooping eyelids that meant he had to tilt his head back to see, she said.
His vision was so bad that he needed a fairly rare prescription in child-size lenses, and Walling worried they wouldn’t be able to provide them. However, she and other optometrists were able to send the 4-year-old home with three pairs of glasses that improved his vision.
“He was so happy,” she remembered with a smile. “He was my absolute favorite.”
It was Walling’s second trip to Kenya; she first traveled with VOSH in 2010 with her husband. This time, she traveled with her son, Gus Walling, 14.
Though Walling was accustomed to the inequality between the wealthy areas of the city and the surrounding slums, it was shocking to her son, she said.
“He was asking, ‘Is this where they live?’ … There’s a huge contrast between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots,’” she said. “I think it helped him understand how blessed we are and how kids are kids no matter where they are; they just happen to be born into different circumstances.”
VOSH/International works to book their charitable trips with a safari company that also helps young people leave the slums and find a better life, she said.
Their second week in Kenya, the 22 visitors traveled through various nature preserves in the country, seeing the country and its animals, including lions, elephants, giraffes and more.
Some of those who traveled alongside the eye doctors were college students and recipients of scholarships that helped them get out of the slums, she said.
For about $1,600 a year, the young adults are able to live in a private boarding school, Walling said.
“Many of them are orphans who got stuck there,” she said. “Their parents were killed and someone decided to help them make a good life.”
Walling said she was touched and proud when her son asked that instead of Christmas presents, his family provide the $1,600 to sponsor another such scholarship.
She hopes to go on another trip in three years and plans to take her now-11-year-old son.
“It went so well this time, and it’s such a good place to have a clinic,” she said.
