Ruth Perrott ’s vision for Malawi

FEBRUARY is the rainy season in Malawi. The rivers turn brick red and the dusty, bumpy roads become squelching mud tracks. In a makeshift eye clinic in the capital, Lilongwe, York optometrist Ruth Perrott found herself conducting eye tests in the rain.

The problem was that the room in which the clinic was being held was too small. There was nowhere indoors to hang the eye chart.

So it was taped to a brick wall opposite the open door. A helper with an umbrella stood outside, pointing to letters on the chart while the patients sat inside trying to read them.

Back home in Copmanthorpe, Ruth laughed at the memory. “That’s part of life there! It’s just Malawi,” she said.

It is a country where people just put up with the rain in the rainy season, she said. “There’s no point wearing a coat, because it is 25 to 30 degrees and you sweat. So you get wet, then you dry out again.”

Ruth, who practices in Acomb, and fellow optometrist Sarah Dineen, from Glossop, had arrived in the country a few days earlier, just missing a three-day airport strike. Their mission was to tour the towns and villages of northern Malawi, holding nine eye clinics at eight different locations along the route.

It was Ruth’s tenth visit to Africa since 1991. Originally she went with Vision Aid Overseas, but this was her third visit to Malawi in five years as part of the Madalitso Optometry team.

Madalitso, she explained, means ‘‘blessings’’ in Chichewa, the local language. The charity was founded by David and Gillian Mason, preachers on the York Methodist Circuit. The original aim was Bible teaching with village pastors, but this quickly extended to literacy work – especially with women, who in the past were excluded from education.

A few years ago, David went to preach at Ruth’s church. She had already been to Africa many times to prescribe free glasses – but never to Malawi.

She was intrigued by his accounts of Madalitso’s work there. “I said, can they see the Bibles you are using? If not, I could come and help.”

A simple pair of glasses can make a huge difference in a country such as Malawi, Ruth said. Because of poor diet and high levels of ultraviolet and infrared light, eyesight deteriorates more quickly than it does here.

It is common to start needing reading glasses in Malawi by the age of 30. “And if you can’t see to read or to thread a needle or perform other work, then you can’t house, feed, educate, clothe or provide healthcare for your family.”

The first time she went to Malawi with Madalitso was in 2007. This year was her third trip. She and Ruth were met by Bishop Rutherford Banda and his wife, Pastor Tsahai Banda, in Lilongwe.

They spent the next 11 days driving around the north of the country on those roads churned into squelching red mud.

Their clinics had been publicised in advance and at each place they set up, they would be met by queues of locals desperate to get glasses so they could see better. As word spread that they had arrived, more and more people would gather.

“The longer you were there, the longer the queue grew,” Ruth said. In one town, Mzuzu, they eventually had to pack up and go without being able to see everyone. “They were coming faster than we could see them.”

They met some extraordinary people. In Mzimba, it was Nowell, a 58-year-old who wanted to study the Bible. He’d been crippled by polio as a child, and his lower legs were withered.

He got around on his hands and knees – with a special pair of gloves for his hands. Ruth said she couldn’t help with his polio. “But at least he got his reading glasses.”

In Nsaru, it was Hilda, a 57-year-old local farmer.

Back in Linlongwe, at the end of the trip in an impromptu clinic at Bishop Rutherford’s home, it was Sheibu, a timid 13-year-old schoolboy.

Because the clinic hadn’t been pre-planned, the team’s helpers went out into the streets to invite passers-by in. Sheibu was one. He needed strong glasses to be able to see.

The team tested his sight, then fitted him with a pair. “He was in a state of shock,” Ruth said. “I remember thinking nobody would believe him when he got home and showed them. They’d be saying: ‘What do you mean, somebody dragged you off the street and gave you a pair of glasses!’”

In Mzimba, where the clinic was held in the Tree of Life Church – little more than a large wooden hut with a mud floor – Ruth was given a lift to the clinic on the back of a bicyle taxi.

In Mzuzu, where they stayed for nearly two days, they held two clinics in a room with no electricity or running water in a house belonging to a local woman, Beatrice, who had set up a women’s sewing group to help to support local families.

They fitted one of the sewing group, a woman named Esterline, with a pair of glasses. She was “delighted at being able to thread her needles again”, Ruth said.

The first clinic at Mzuzu was oddly quiet. “There was a funeral in a neighbouring village and when there is a funeral, everybody goes.”

The second day’s clinic more than made up for it, however. It was also in Mzuzu that Ruth observed Beatrice’s young daughter kneeling to address a man who was visiting.

“If a girl is addressing an older, mature man, then if he is sitting down it is customary that she kneels in front of him to address him,” she said.

During their tour of northern Malawi, the Madalitso team quickly established a routine. They would arrive, then set up four workstations. There was a registration point, an area to test visual acuity using a chart, a darkened area for the optometrists, Ruth and Sarah, to examine eyes and prepare prescriptions and a dispensing area, where glasses were handed out.

Often, a translator was needed. Sometimes, a special eye chart was used, with pictures instead of letters, for patients who couldn’t read.

The glasses they dispensed were not new, but ‘‘recycled’’ ones donated to Ruth and Sarah in the UK (see panel).

It was a question of prescribing a pair that was the best possible match to a patient’s needs, Ruth said. “They weren’t perfect, but they were a lot better than nothing.”

Altogether, during their 11-day tour, she and Sarah tested the sight of more than 1,100 people and prescribed and dispensed about 800 pairs of glasses.

Everywhere they went, they were met by the same delighted response: “I can see! I can read!”

That was never more true than in Nsaru. On a previous visit in 2011, Ruth had run out of glasses to prescribe.

She made a list of 76 people who had come to the clinic but who she had not been able to help and promised to come back.

There was a sceptical reaction. “They must have had a lot of broken promises,” she said.

But she made a point of returning to Nsaru this time – and those 76 people were at the head of the queue. The reaction was typical. “When we gave them their glasses, it was: ‘Wow! I can see. I can read.’”

There is probably no other profession which can change the lives of so many people, so dramatically, in such a short space of time, she said.

“I’m privileged, really, to be able to do this.”

• The glasses Ruth gives to patients in Africa are all recycled glasses that she collects in the UK before a trip. She has a team of spectacle collectors and for more than 20 years members of The Rotary Club of York Ainsty have been meeting once a month to sort, wash, measure and adjust the glasses. There is proper quality control. Ruth said: “We make sure they’re not scratched.”

So if you have an old pair of glasses you don’t use any more, don’t just throw them away. Instead, send them to Ruth Perrott at VisionCare Optometry, 30 York Road, Acomb, York YO24 4LZ. They could, after being cleaned and repaired, make a huge difference to the quality of life of someone in Africa.