Carcasse - Day 3

Thursday, 02/23/2012
While Honore gave his water and sanitation presentation to the primary school students, Diana, Ben, Marty and I taught some young secondary school kids how to make rosaries from beads and string Diana had brought from the US. They were visibly pleased to be making something that vaguely resembled jewelry, and they all wanted the sparkly beads for their rosaries. Some complained that the rosaries we were making were too short to put around their necks, but we told them that wasn’t the purpose of a rosary. Seeing as the parents here barely have enough money to buy notebooks for their children, jewelry is a luxury few to none can afford. Indeed, several times people asked Jack or other team members for the watches on their wrists, and several people including little girls have said that they wanted my glasses, or at least some glasses since their eyes are bad. From what I’ve seen, I am the only person wearing glasses in Carcasse, apart from Abbe Damas, one of the priests in training here. And it certainly isn’t because they’re wearing contact lenses! But glasses and hence the ability to see clearly are way beyond the villagers’ economic reach. When I think of how incapacitated I am without my glasses, I wonder whether eyeglasses and other ways to correct vision shouldn’t be a priority in development projects. I don’t mind having occasional digestive troubles, but never being able to see people’s facial expressions when they’re talking can take the joy out of life. I suppose blind people have figured out a way around that, but for me it’s still crucial, especially when I’m learning a new language. On a more serious note, not being able to read the lessons on the blackboard can ruin even the most talented students’ chances of excelling at school. As I write this, I realize I don’t even know whether all the students in my own English classes can read what I write on the blackboard, and wonder whether their myopia might be the reason why it takes some of them so long to copy everything down.

The team then visited the clinic in Carcasse run by two nurses full-time and one doctor for two weeks out of the month. It was quite clean and neat, with the medicine arranged in an orderly way.
I attended the APCC meeting in the afternoon, headed by Jack and the head of the APCC, Walnus. The results of that meeting can be found on Jack’s report.