Sight

It started with a single sentence.

"There's, what, 400 kids at your school and not one of them wears glasses?"

For those of you who don't know me so well, when I return to Scotland I'm studying for my optometry degree at university, so when my dad pointed this out to me on his trip to V.A.G.I.S. I wondered how I hadn't seen it before. Uncorrected sight is the number one cause of blindness in the world, and if any of my kids had ever seen an optometrist in their lives then Mary Woode lived to be 100 years old (basically...no.). So I decided to do something about it.

I tested my entire school's eyesight in one week (headmaster was practically dancing with joy), and in the next few weeks I travel to Takoradi to test the pupils at Timoskay and Nazareth schools. I've finally found a way that I can make a real difference in this country.

I guess my optometric career began under the shade of the big tree in a dusty schoolyard in the middle of West Africa. And was almost immediately interrupted by a herd of goats.

Amyless

Yeah, she's not coming back.

Homecoming

After three weeks travelling, I finally returned home to Achiase last week. It was strange, I never realised just how much I missed this place until my tro-tro pulled into town. Leaving here is going to be hard.

In other news, last week was supposed to be the final and definite return of my partner to Ghana. I know I haven't ever spoken about it properly on this blog, but after just three weeks at our placement my partner, Amy, was called back to Canada for a family emergency. Due to a mixture of airline strikes, bad weather and visa problems, she's been trying to return to Achiase for two months now. I was told on Tuesday that she had arrived in Accra, she was actually in the country, and on Wednesday she would definitely be here.

I still don't have a partner.

I'm beginning to think she was just a mass hallucination.

Don't Panic.

Don't panic.

You. Right there. You.

Calm down.

It is impossible to panic in Ghana. We all operate on Ghana-time, which basically means that something will happen when we are ready or possibly sometime after that or maybe not at all but it doesn't really matter because it's all going to be okay either way, so it really is just impossible to panic. At home everything is such a BIG DEAL and everybody is worried about something, but here nobody worries, and when nobody worries, nobody needs to worry. Okay, I realise I'm not really making sense right now. What I mean is that if a person in the U.K. were to do something wrong, the repercussions of that wrong action would cause others to panic, hence the first person would also have to panic. But in Ghana there is no panic in others to be caused, and so there is absolutely no need to panic.

Get it? No? Oh, nevermind then.

Just don't panic.


P.S. Had by far my most dangerous encounter in Ghana the other day - with a drunk London geezer trying to pick a fight at a beach resort. Fortunately, I didn't panic.