Students and staff filed onto the bus at the end of the workday. They’d spent the whole day visiting students in grades one through six in Jamaica, performing eye exams and assigning them prescriptions.
They were about to take off when the principal of the school came back outside.
“Come back,” she’d said. “We have something for you.”
The students and staff followed the principal back to the schoolyard, where they found kids singing and playing the drums for them. It was a way to say thank you for the services they’d provided.
Providing that care is one professor at Indiana University, along with optometry students. Through the See Better. Learn Better. program, they provide continuous, long-term eyecare for kids in 18 schools in Jamaica, where services are limited and expensive.
Katie Connolly, executive director of the program and a clinical professor at IU, said on the island with a population of about 2.8 million people, there are only about 15 registered optometrists whose services are concentrated in the east. In Bloomington, there are over 100 optometrists. And there’s only one office in Jamaica that specializes in pediatrics, also located in the east in the capital, Kingston.
“The area that I'm working in is very rural,” she said. “So, a lot of these children are living five, six hours away from the capital city, and really don't have the means to be able to transport themselves for routine eye care, and certainly not for glasses over to the eastern side of the island.”
Anika Robinson, a board member for See Better. Learn Better., who works with Dr. Connolly, said because comprehensive eye exams are hard to come by and are not mandatory, it may be unclear that vision is the reason why a student isn’t doing well in school.
“Sometimes when you have an issue like an eye condition, some of them are not very obvious, so they don't know how to articulate that,” Robinson said. “So, you'd hear your child saying, ‘Oh, Mom, I have a headache,’ lashing out in classes, just being disruptive, but they don't know what's wrong, because if you look at a child, you can't immediately say that they have an eye issue.”
And because eyecare is expensive, it’s hard for parents to choose to spend money on an exam over necessities.
“When a parent has to think about, 'oh, do I buy groceries for my kids to eat, or do I get their eyes tested,' they most certainly would choose to buy groceries, those basic food items,” Robinson said.
To fill that gap, Dr. Connolly, along with 10 to 22 optometry students, visit about 2,000 kids in Jamaica over four days. Many of them have never received an eye exam before.
After completing the eye exams for free, Dr. Connolly and the students go back to Bloomington to prepare prescriptions and revisit the schools a couple months later to distribute the glasses. They do this twice a year.
For many of the optometry students that assist Dr. Connolly, this is their first time seeing real patients.
“This was just increasing the number of patients I was able to see. And I just loved being able to work with the kids,” said Rachel Cartwright, a fourth-year graduate student in the optometry school who went to Jamaica in March. “…It's really rewarding, and I'm just really glad that we're able to provide the service to them, because it does definitely make a difference. You can see some of the kids get so excited when they're able to see for the first time.”
Camara Brown, an ophthalmologist and glaucoma surgeon based in Kingston, Jamaica, who has volunteered with the program, said she hopes to expand the program to other schools in Jamaica. She also wants the work they do to become a standardized model replicated across the country. That would require cooperation from the government to provide resources and funding.
“If we say education is our priority and the children are our future, then it can't just be the children who have good vision,” she said. “You know, everyone deserves an opportunity.”
