Catherine was overjoyed when she heard about the opportunity to become a community health volunteer with Operation Eyesight.

However, Catherine’s family was not so thrilled.

“Why would you want to work for free?” They would ask her.

“I volunteer because I’m helping people. It’s my dream come true!” Catherine says.

She always wanted to help the people in her community. As a girl, she had wanted to become a nurse. Unfortunately, while she was still in school her father retired and left her village, and she wasn’t able to finish her training.

Later on, Catherine’s husband passed away, leaving her to raise four children alone. Two of her children have since married and moved into their own homes, leaving Catherine with her youngest daughter and son.

To make ends meet, Catherine became a merchant at the local market, and has since established a small grocery store near her home which provides her with a steady income. Because Catherine’s family is supported by the grocery store, she’s able to volunteer in her community as an eye health worker. Plus, she was a natural choice for the position because she had the necessary base-level of education for the job.

Her day starts early as she prepares to go to the Chawama eye clinic, one of our partner hospitals in Zambia. She performs door-to-door eye screenings, and sometimes she works in the eye care department supporting ophthalmic personnel.

As a volunteer, Catherine advises people in her communities to seek professional health care in general, not just eye care.

Catherine’s work is challenging, especially not knowing how people will react to her when she visits each household. Some welcome her while others refuse to even talk to her. The people who refuse her do so because they believe that community health workers might bring diseases with them.

In some cases, adult patients agree to be screened, but won’t allow their children to be screened. This is often because of religious superstition. That’s why community health workers always carry identity cards with them. The cards are provided by the hospital and prove that they work for the hospital, and are not part of a religious cult.

In some cases, it’s a lack of education that influences patients’ reactions. One patient stands out in Catherine’s memory –  a lady by the name of Sabina who couldn’t see because of bi-lateral cataract (cataract in both eyes).  Sabina was too afraid to go for surgery because she’d been told that the doctors would remove her eyes and put them on a dish to wash them before replacing them. A story that would discourage anyone!

But Catherine’s counseling helped Sabina make the decision to have cataract surgery — and today she is so very excited to see again!

After seeing all the good Catherine has done through her volunteering, her family members are now supportive. Community health workers are well-respected. Many people will seek them out for advice on various health issues, especially eye health care.

“Even neighbours in my community will look for me when they visit the clinic to ask me about the various processes. I’m always happy to help them,” says Catherine.

Catherine plans to continue assisting the community even after the project is complete. She knows there will always be a need for health work.

Catherine has encouraged others to volunteer as community health workers so they can also help those in need in the community.

Although Catherine may not be paid for her work, there are other benefits that come with being a health worker. “Thanks to the work I do, I’m regarded as a member of the staff at the eye clinic, which gives my family and I ready access to the health care we need right when we need it,” says Catherine.

Catherine is thankful to everyone involved in her work including the doctors who treat patients and her fellow community health workers. She’s especially thankful and so grateful to the generous people of Canada for their donations.

“The donations from the people in Canada are helping the Zambian people, especially in the community of Chawama. Now many lives have been changed with the gift of restored vision,” she says.

Just imagine how much good your gifts have done. The community of Chawama are receiving the eye health care they need, and women like Catherine are empowered to make real and tangible changes for the better in their communities. There are still many communities who need your help – please consider giving to our community screening and outreach program today to help other communities like Chawama.

The post A big heart for the people – this community health volunteer is changing lives. appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

We certainly celebrated World Sight Day with style last week… by opening a beautiful new centre for eye health at University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia.

“My government wishes to express its sincere gratitude to Operation Eyesight, who put in a huge capital-intensive investment to construct this centre,” Zambia’s Minister of Health, Hon. Dr. Joseph Kasonde, told a crowd of supporters at the opening event. He added, “This eye centre of excellence will certainly raise the profile of eye health services delivery at UTH and in the country as a whole.”

The original UTH eye clinic was a small and dilapidated heritage building, which needed almost total reconstruction to ensure it met clinical quality standards. Today’s bright and beautiful Ophthalmic Centre will offer ophthalmology specialities for treating pediatrics, vitreo-retinal, anterior segment, and glaucoma, as well as provide community eye health and research. It will train professionals (including ophthalmologists) in various eye health areas, and will provide a research and resource centre for all eye health services in the country.

Not only will this facility increase staff training, improve patient screening and treatment, and realize improved surgical outcomes and productivity, there is also another reason to celebrate its grand opening: it’s a wonderful example of what’s possible when we collaborate with generous donors and governments.

The Ophthalmic Centre is the culmination of eight years of hard work and strong partnerships between Operation Eyesight, Nava Bharat Ventures Limited of Hyderabad, India, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Government of Zambia’s Ministry of Health, and University Teaching Hospital. As our Regional Director for Africa, Dr. Boateng Wiafe, told me, “This was a classic example of true partnership. Every partner brought something to the table to get the work done.”

All of us at Operation Eyesight congratulate and acknowledge the partners and donors who made the construction of the new Ophthalmic Centre possible. We were proud to have been part of this project.

We especially would like to thank Delphin Kinkese, our Zambian country manager, and Dr. Grace Mutati, chief ophthalmologist of University Teaching Hospital, for overseeing the project and ensuring the opening was a huge success.
I know the centre will provide Zambians a great resource within the full continuum of eye care services for many years to come!

Operation Eyesight has been working to prevent avoidable blindness in Zambia since 1985, and has been supporting University Teaching Hospital since 2005. Where else do we have hospital programs? Find out here.

The post Zambia’s new eye hospital a celebration of partnership appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

To answer that, picture a tribal woman in a remote part of India, who is going blind from cataracts. She’s a poor woman who knows if she can’t see she can’t work; and if she can’t work, she doesn’t eat. The woman knows there is an eye clinic not too far away that can fix her eyes free of charge. But she doesn’t go.

Why not? Because she knows people with similar problems who have gone to that clinic, and came back worse than before. The woman may be poor, but she’s no fool. She would rather live with the grey fog of cataract-clouded vision than risk being permanently blinded, or in pain due to a botched surgery.

Throughout India and other countries with large populations of low income people, this scenario plays out over and over. Cataract is the main cause of avoidable blindness everywhere, affecting millions of people; yet cataracts are relatively easy and inexpensive to correct.

Many charitable eye clinics, in their efforts to restore sight to cataract sufferers, have been pushing people through the system for years. Medical teams cut corners and take chances that would be unthinkable in other countries. The emphasis on quantity (instead of quality) translates into failed surgeries. It’s still happening today. Many hospitals that offer free treatment to the poor receive their funding based on the number of people they treat, instead of how many people get healed.

In 2003, a landmark research project studied the impact of all those cataract surgeries. It confirmed that yes, cataract was the number one cause of blindness – about 50 percent of all cases. Cause number two? Failed cataract surgeries.

This news landed with a thud throughout the international eye care community. I can tell you how Operation Eyesight responded: we resolved to place quality among our top priorities. We communicated this expectation to our medical partners, and lost some who were unwilling to work towards our goals in the process. Since then, we have invested in upgrades to facilities, training, equipment and procedures. While this is still a work in progress in some regions, we are working with all of our hospital partners to achieve World Health Organization (WHO) standards in surgical outcomes – the same as in Canada, where I live.

But there’s more! Quality is not just about best practices; it’s about how we regard the people who need our help – people like that same tribal woman I mentioned earlier. Come back on June 8 when I’ll describe what we see when we look through her eyes. And learn more about our approach to quality in our Spring 2012 newsletter, “No compromise: Quality is key to achieving sustainable development.”

The post We must see through their eyes (Part 1 of 2) appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

In those days, Operation Eyesight focused mainly on people with cataracts. Cataract surgery is still an important part of our work because cataract remains the world’s leading cause of avoidable blindness. In fact, more than half of the world’s blind people are blind because of cataract. Have a look at this short video to learn more about this common condition.

For a child, being blind means she can’t go to school – and education is the ticket to a better life in the developing world. Blindness for an older person means that he is totally dependent on family for even the simplest things like food and finding his way to the outhouse. In the developing world, a blind woman may be outcast, abandoned by family because she is seen as a burden.

As the countries in which we work develop functional health care systems, hospitals become more efficient and can meet international standards. And strengthening the health care systems is the best strategy to deal with the backlog of cataract cases.

When you donate for a cataract surgery, you’re not only giving a person in Africa or India the gift of sight, but you’re also contributing to the operating costs of that hospital until that hospital is self-sufficient and can cover these costs themselves.

Subsidizing operating costs is important for new partners in India, and for partners in Africa where achieving self-sufficiency is a longer process.

Ultimately, a more efficient, productive hospital means that it will eventually be able to fund the surgeries and other necessary costs itself. That is Operation Eyesight’s goal – strong hospitals and health systems that can operate successfully without any outside intervention. Most importantly, it gets us closer to a world free of avoidable blindness.

The post The gift of sight – and much, much more appeared first on Operation Eyesight.