Early Tuesday thoughts

It’s about half an hour before breakfast and there are the usual tweaks we need to make to the clinic today.  We’re going to work on making the reading glasses station more efficient, probably by getting an extra table and increasing it from 3 to 4 volunteers fitting reading glasses for our patients.  In terms of sheer numbers, patients get far more reading glasses than they do distance glasses or referrals for cataract or other eye surgeries at our vision clinics.  So, it’s important that the busiest area doesn’t become a bottleneck. 

I had some difficulty overnight in getting the batteries fully charged for the autorefractors, the devices we use to examine eyes for distance glasses.  Since we want to see large numbers of people to bless them both with our human care ministry and with the Gospel, it is essential that these refractors are running when needed.  They take far less time to perform a diagnosis to get a distance glasses prescription than an exam by a doctor.  We have extra batteries and will make it through today, but we’ll have to jump on charging every possible battery up tonight after work, since I expect the rest of the week to be very busy.  The problem seems to be that I had too many things plugged into one surge protector and the camcorder chargers we use may not have been getting enough juice.  We can also plug the refractors themselves in, but they take about 8 hours for a charge.  The chargers we have been using have taken around 2 to 3 hours, on the average.  So, I guess we’ll use a combination of both methods to get the most batteries back up to snuff.  Details, details!

We will have breakfast here and be on the road by 7:30, hoping that the first day back to work for many doesn’t produce too much traffic at that hour.  Our trip is short in terms of miles, but it can take quite a while under heavy vehicle and human traffic conditions.  More to follow after another day at the clinic!