Every spring for 10 years, Dr. Ozzie Reynolds and his wife, Patsy, have traveled together to a place along the Zambezi River of mud huts, sandy soil and dugout canoes.
In Mwandi, the natives generally cook one meal a day over an open fire.
Dried fish provides their protein, and a corn grain with the consistency of mashed potatoes is a daily staple, always eaten hand-to-mouth.
Children are seen taking care of children in Mwandi. AIDS has claimed the lives of many of their parents. At least some strides are being made in combatting the infant mortality rates.
Malaria poses a constant threat to everyone, visitors included.
As many of the adults age, they lose their sight to the clouds of cataracts.
Blindness, in fact, often has been accepted through the years as part of growing old.
When the bush “doctors” tried to cure blindness in the past, they would place seeds or grains onto their patients’ eyes, serving only to scratch corneas and make things worse.
“It’s horrible to be blind anywhere, but it’s really horrible to be blind in a Third World country,” Patsy Reynolds says.
In this tiny corner of Zambia, Africa, the annual medical mission of Ozzie and Patsy Reynolds has made a dramatic impact on restoring the sight of hundreds of people.
Dr. Reynolds, a Salisbury ophthalmologist, has performed 508 surgeries to date, including 63 this past spring.
Patsy (and their son, Chance) often has served as his sterile or surgical nurse, and they’ve been assisted each year by Mr. Chihanna, a local medical officer.
The stress for Dr. Reynolds comes in preparing for each trip and his worries that he left something crucial behind in Salisbury. Traveling on airlines and through airports with all of their containers also has become increasingly difficult.
But once Reynolds is settled in at both the Mwandi Mission Hospital and the Simba House, from which the hospital is a 5-minute walk, his cataract surgeries represent medicine in its purest form.
“I can fix them,” Dr. Reynolds says.
He even finds the nonstop work relaxing in a way, though he cannot operate any faster than the World War II sterilizer allows. Patsy says “he does not look up,” once he’s into the rhythm of each day.
Reynolds sends his patients home, seeing again. It’s as simple as that.
He feels fortunate to be able to perform a task and leave something tangible, really tangible, behind ó the gift of sight.
The Salisbury couple also feel part of something bigger ó the mission work started years ago by Thyatira Presbyterian Church which has been continually followed through by Presbyterians throughout Rowan County.
The grass-roots efforts of local Presbyterians have driven improvements in Mwandi, not the national headquarters.
“This is a ground-up mission instead of a top-down one,” Dr. Reynolds says, listing numerous names of people who have gone to Mwandi before them and with them, including Salisbury High teacher Bill Lee this past spring.
Once the hospital had electricity and treated water, the crucial components were in place for cataract surgeries.
For three years, a Michigan ophthalmologist performed the first operations at the Mwandi hospital before Reynolds took over in 1999.
“We went because they asked us,” Reynolds explained. (Patsy already had taken one trip to Mwandi.)
The Salisbury couple spend about two-and-a-half weeks traveling to and serving in Mwandi. The trips coincide with spring breaks at Catawba College, where Patsy serves as a Latin instructor.
Mr. Chihanna, the equivalent of a physician’s assistant, serves as interpreter for them at the hospital. He also arranges for the patients who need Reynolds’ attention.
“He’s the instrument that makes it happen,” Patsy says of their friend, Mr. Chihanna.
When the patients, most of them older, arrive for their screenings, they are a quiet, stoic group and remain so throughout the first day.
Patsy says many of them feel as though they have nothing to lose. Their eyes, in many cases, are completely opaque because the cataracts have been present so long.
Dr. Reynolds and his assistants set up a clinic, make evaluations then prepare each patient with a nerve block, which would be unnerving for anyone.
Reynolds must employ a needle to numb the areas around and under the eye. It feels like a bee sting, he says, and it’s best for the patient to be looking away.
“They’re tough,” he says of his patients in Mwandi.
After the nerve block, each patient has to walk to the operating table. Reynolds averages about eight or nine surgeries a day, given all the pre-operation and post-operation work mixed in.
The next day when the bandages come off, the patients’ vision is still blurry from the antibiotic ointment, and they’re wearing what Patsy calls “Ray Charles sunglasses” to protect them from too much light.
But the group’s transformation is fun to watch.
Patsy sees them looking at their hands first, then raising their heads to cast their eyes on something else.
Gradually, the solemn men and women, still in their hospital gowns, become a joyous group because they’re seeing things they thought they would never see again.
Singing sometimes breaks out, and smiles ó which were completely absent the day before ó spread across their faces.
Dr. Reynolds remembers watching the reaction of his first Mwandi patients in 1999.
“This is why we come,” he said then, and that confirmation has sustained him every trip.
Patients who have cataracts in both eyes look forward after the first operation to returning the next time for an operation on the other eye.
Patsy says it always takes some innovation and searching within one’s self to make things work in Mwandi. They might have to deal, for example, with bees, ants, lizards or power outages.
“You never know what is going to happen,” she says.
When others, including physicians, ask Dr. Reynolds how they could help in Zambia, he finds it difficult to give them a definitive answer but tells them, “Why don’t you go over, see what you can do and do that.”
He dreams of a medical school some day committing its students to Mwandi and devising a health-care plan for this part of Africa that would include a rotating staff of doctors.
Long range, he says, the answer lies in education so that the people of Zambia become the problem-solvers and visiting physicians such as him are the helpers.
He expresses frustration that maybe more Zambian doctors are in the United States than in their homeland.
Churches are the other ingredient in helping to improve conditions in Zambia, Reynolds says.
For the time being, Ozzie and Patsy Reynolds plan to keep returning to Mwandi.
At every departure, the Zambian people always want to know when they’re coming back, and Patsy says her humble husband will keep returning just to avoid a thank-you party in which a cow would be slaughtered in his honor.
It’s been an amazingly productive mission so far
Ten trips and 500 surgeries have “a nice feel to it,” Dr. Reynolds says.
Ozzie and Patsy Reynolds will talk about their work in Mwandi at John Calvin Presbyterian Church’s Wednesday Night Live program. Dinner is at 6 p.m., followed by the program at 6:30. For more information or to make a dinner reservation, call the church office at 704-633-4333.