Yes! That I'm used to. Because a lot of women in my family go blind as they age, protecting my eyesight was one of my mother's obsessions.
Oh no, that's horrible!
BTW, as a fellow language lover, another plus point for considering Tanzania (or East Africa generally) in your adoption search, is I think you may enjoy learning some Swahili (assuming you haven't learnt any yet, of course, which I could be wrong on). It's a gorgeous language (it's very sing songy, has only long vowels and no dipthongs), relatively simple grammar (apart from the noun classes) and it has a really fun system for building up sentences.