A VERY Thorough Tour

 

Today we went on a little field trip. Our field trip consisted of a tour of Joseph Eye Hospital specializing in….eyes. They also have a section of the hospital focused on disability rehabilitation. We began our visit to Joseph Eye Hospital with a 15 minute chapel service that all employees attend in the morning. We then went on a very thorough 4 hour tour where we were showed everything in the hospital including, but not limited to the operation rooms, fire extinguishers, walkways, accounting offices, HR offices, patient and employee canteens, and disability friendly ramps. I think the only thing we were not shown were the toilets. Our very friendly tour guide introduced us to almost every employee of the hospital, except maybe the janitors, allowing us to see every department. The introductions even led us to get to enjoy a stock room full of lenses. He even had their blind patients show us that they’ve learned their way around the hospital and had one patient in rehabilitation walk around the room to show us she can now walk.

 

Joseph Eye Hospital is very top notch. They had modern accommodations, operating rooms, and sterilization. We were shown their processes for sterilization, feeding patients, and scrubbing in for an operation. There were three things I really enjoyed about this hospital: they self-employee their patients with disabilities, they will do procedures for free if the patient cannot afford it, and they care about patent care just as much as they do about medical care. Outside of the eye portion of the hospital they focus a lot on patients with disabilities, providing them with jobs and education. We were told that the disability patients are taught simple ways of life so when their family members pass, they can support themselves. They teach them by having them make cups, candles, chairs and tables, envelopes, and notebooks which they then sell in the hospital.

A disability patient selling snacks and products made at the hospital.

 

Here's us and our wondeful tour guide.

 

So today we got a new driver, apparently our other one is taking a month off for health reasons. Now, I wouldn’t normally include our new driver in my blog, but tonight it led to an adventure. Not only was it this new driver’s first day, he speaks little to no English. Tonight he graciously drove me to Dr. Priya’s office as told, which I find out upon arrival is closed. I tried to tell him her office was closed and to take me back to Bishop Heber which then led to us sitting on the side of the road for 10 minutes and him trying to drive me to a different hospital to observe. He could not grasp the concept that he took me to the correct place but she was not there. He gave up on our lack of communication skills and eventually called someone to translate. 20 minutes later I made it back safely to Bishop Heber College and our driver is now probably confused beyond belief.  The bright side is I learned how to communicate with our driver: two word sentences accompanied by hand motions.