The case of the missing eye charts, and the never ending story (of wire transfers)

Another action-packed day in SMA and the surrounding communities! We returned to San Francisco, the very first town we had visited. We had been warned that there would be a lot of people today, and since we hadn’t done glucose checks and vision screenings there yet, those were our main goals for the day… until we started unpacking and realized that the eye charts (“Snellen charts,” if you will) were missing. No one could remember packing them up from our last community, and for a few minutes we were uncertain if we would be able to perform vision screenings at all. The school in the community had already excused kids from class for the vision screenings, and their parents were there. Luckily, Rafa saved the day – he went down the road (which was quite a ways, down a dirt/gravel road) to a local doctor and fortunately was able to borrow his Snellen chart. From then on out, it was a lot of vision screenings and parental consent forms and child assent forms and dietary nutrition surveys as part of our research project. The day ended up being very successful despite the rocky start, and we now have a repacking procedure to make sure all of our supplies come and go with us!

Jason, providing vision screenings to the kids in San Francisco

We spent another afternoon (this makes the fourth or fifth, at least) trying to coordinate banking and wire transfers over skype and email in order to be able to pay our host family. All parties involved (us, the banks, our contacts and UNC going to the banks for us, and our host family) are getting a bit frustrated with the saga that has involved two separate identities, two corrections to the wire transfer that were actually incorrect, and three separate banks (I think – but I’ve sort of lost track). Alas, we hope to sort it all out soon.

With one more health fair tomorrow, we have a lot to look forward to this weekend: the JR crew called us up and told us of their plans to come visit this weekend, which should be fun; meeting up with Dr. Quiroz at some point, who helped get the SMA branch of PPS up and running; some sort of parade thing in the city on Sunday; dinner at Kip’s house on Sunday. A fathers’ day BBQ in the back yard and teaming up with an organization that helps kids in SMA with difficult home lives for some breakfast/charlas/hang ing out are also possibilities for the weekend.