Child Guides

Before traveling to Ethiopia, Larry and Dr. Guzek, a Washington ophthalmologist who supports and performs cataract surgeries at the eye camps annually, had told me about the high prevalence of child guides leading the blind around in Ethiopia.  They were interested in finding out the extent of these child guides and the economic and social effect of having a child lead a blind person around- if it required them to miss school and, in turn, earn lower wages.  So Anne-Berit, a nursing PhD student at UCSF, Mario, and I discussed and brainstormed how we could get to the heart of this issue in the months leading up to our trips to Ethiopia.

Once I arrived here, it would have been hard not to notice the many children leading the blind around.  In fact, one day in clinic a young boy of about seven years old entered the gate pulling an elderly blind man named Kajela behind him.  Alami and I asked the boy about his situation- Was he a relative of Kajela?  Was he being paid to help?  Did he need to miss school in order to lead Kajela around?

The boy's answers were far more innocuous than we might have suspected.  His family was neighbors with Kajela.  Although Kajela had children of his own, they were tired of taking care of him, so the boy's mother, feeling sorry for Kajela, directed her son to help lead him to the eye clinic.  Although the boy wasn't receiving any money for being a guide, he wasn't missing any school either, as he was on summer vacation.

As we investigated further into the issue, it seemed we had opened a Pandora's box.  Trudie, a Peace Corps worker in Dembi Dollo, explained that from her observations, education wasn't a very high priority for the typical person in the area, regardless of whether or not a family had a blind person who needed to be led around.  She had seen that children were regularly kept home from school by their families if they were needed to help in the fields or around the house.  Although children were required to be present in school a minimum number of days to progress to the next grade, in her conversations with a government education official, he had admitted that, in actuality, many students who did not meet the required attendance were still advanced to the next grade.

At the Gambella eye camp, we began implementing surveys we had designed to the patients waiting to receive cataract surgery and discovered additional complexities.  Some of Jango's public health students who helped us administer the surveys seemed mystified by the questions.  One student informed us that the family was a tight-knit unit in Nu'er culture, so if one member was in need, the others would do whatever they could to help- so it was a given that children would help guide an elder if he or she were blind.  Furthermore, their families were often large enough that children could switch off in their duties so that, even if they had to miss school, they would only miss a minimal amount.  Another student chimed in that he had only observed children guiding the blind after school, meaning our questions about missing school were essentially non-questions.  These comments revealed that the child-guide situation was much more nuanced and complex than we had initially believed, and that a sufficient understanding of the situation would require, as a prerequisite, a much deeper knowledge of Ethiopian culture than we possessed.


Ultimately, the boy who had led Kajela to clinic returned the next day with his mother.  He excitedly pointed me out as the one who had taken his picture the previous day.  It seemed the whole experience had been, on the whole, fun for him.  Will we ever know the whole story about Ethiopian child guides?  For now, we have to accept the fact that we have likely only scratched the surface.