Next Gen
Optometry student makes difference overseas
By Jody Johnson-Pettit
Canadian student Morgan Jackson has helped to
bring eye care services to a remote region of Senegal,
West Africa. A group of nine students from the university’s
optometry program, including two supervising ODs,
an optician and a layperson, travelled to Kedougou.
Last summer, the third year University of Waterloo
optometry student led a sustainable, independent and
culturally sensitive clinic trip. “I remember a particularly heavy day where a very
unhappy looking young boy came to my ocular health
station. I could not figure out why he seemed to be in
such discomfort,” says Jackson.
“A difficult part of the trip was explaining to those
patients that we could not help them to see better,” says
Jackson, 25. “We had this conversation with far more
people than we had hoped for, and saw many cases of
trauma and end-stage infection.”
Jackson is part of the university’s Volunteer
Optometric Services to Humanity student chapter,
which works to provide primary eye care to people
around the world without access.
34 Optical Prism | May 2019
“After doing a few extra tests, I found that he was in
the active stages of trachoma. We treated and sent
him on his way, but I’m glad that I had caught it before
hurriedly moving to the next patient waiting in line.
Later in the evening, it hit me that if we had not seen
that little boy and intervened, he would have been
irreversibly blind within the year.”
The group worked closely with the Peace Corps to
organize clinic space and meetings with local health