The Final Day...

As a team, we can’t believe that today is the last day of our Colinic in Kokstad. It has been such a surreal experience being here at Oprah’s school. The school is back in session this week, so we’re enjoying being around all her adorable students and, of course helping the thousands of locals in need!

As we mentioned a few days ago, we've had our local media team on site throughout the week to capture our adventure. Check out the "rough cut!" http://luxtube.beluxonline.com/?ID=583

We realized we haven’t shown any pics of the Clinic set-up itself, so here’s a look: All patients line up in a tent to the right of the gate and filter through as called. They then get dilated (eye drops) in the middle of the patio. Once the dilation sets (about 20 mins) then are sent over to Visual Acuity (E chart), which is set up by the small tin building on the right-hand side of this pic. From there, they wait to go into color blindness, depth perception and autorefraction, which are all located in the brick building behind Visual Acuity. From there, they visit the doctors (you can’t see their rooms from the pic) and then wait outside the open door (upper middle of the pic) to receive their glasses in dispense. Inside that open door sits our Inventory Management System, a computer database, which holds the entire Clinic inventory. “Pickers” then find the glasses out of approximately 80,000 frames. If there isn’t an exact match, the script is sent upstairs in this room to “Chabella Heaven” where “Pauly (Craven)” and his “Angels” create the perfect pair.

Since we need to pack-up the entire Clinic this afternoon to send on to SA #2 in Mtubatuba in two weeks, we cut the day short, seeing only 500. As such, there are fewer stories to post. One great one came from Dr. Forum Patel. Today, he gave this musician and elementary school teacher back the greatest gift of all - his site! He was a very strong script and could only afford glasses for distance, not readers. We were able to give him a more accurate script for distance and a great pair of readers which will help him better help his students. Great work!

Marta Vicceli, Todd Palmer and Mike Smith were hard at work all day in dispense!

Elena Savi spent her day dispensing eye drops to each and every patient at the first Clinic station, dilation.


One of our Clinic leaders, Rob Fontaine helped dispense sunnies (as our friends in AUS call them!) in between trips around the Clinic to make sure each station was running smoothly.

Now we know whether or not all patients have any depth perception thanks, in part to Bret Kartak who spent the day at this third Clinic station.

Martina Mescniari was busy in auto refraction getting the first read on each and every patient!

Dr. Angela White used a special piece of head gear with a light to more easily look into her patient’s eyes and make sure she had the most accurate prescription possible.



Dr. Cort White spent today – and every day – doing eye health and script checks for our patients.

Thanks so much to everyone who has been following our adventure and posting comments. We’ll have one more post this weekend to share a few group shots so please stay tuned for one final farewell.