The cheerful toddler was born in 2020, the same year her parents moved back to their home village after widespread lockdowns in India were announced. The little girl was thriving under the care of her extended family when her mother Priyanka noticed that Venus’s eyes were not symmetrical.

It’s a common belief that strabismus, the condition that causes someone’s eyes to point in different directions, goes away on its own. However, children rarely outgrow the condition without treatment. Priyanka wasn’t willing to wait and see.

She worried about the stigma that her little girl would face due to the misalignment of her eyes, knowing she’d be teased by classmates. She also wondered how the condition would affect her daughter’s vision, and consequently, her education and her future.

So when she took Venus in for a routine check-up at the government hospital, Priyanka asked about her daughter’s eyes but was told that there was no treatment for eye conditions at the facility. Priyanka became more and more concerned, worrying that the eye condition would affect Venus’s schooling and professional life.

When a community health worker from the nearby Khanapur Vision Centre knocked on the family’s door, Priyanka had her daughter examined. The health worker identified Venus’s eye condition as strabismus and said that it needed to be treated as quickly as possible. Venus got a referral to the vision centre where an optometrist explained that the little girl’s eye condition could be treated with simple procedures at our partner hospital, the MM Joshi Eye Institute in Hubli, just a few hours away.

Priyanka took Venus to the hospital, where she started undergoing patch therapy. Now, Priyanka is thrilled to see the improvements in her daughter’s eye condition.            

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Paul’s mother first noticed when he was a toddler that his eyes didn’t point in the same direction. She took him to a hospital where a clinician told her that Paul might lose his eyesight completely if he had surgery to fix the problem. She decided not to take the risk, and by grade four, Paul was having trouble reading. Eventually he could not read the blackboard at all and had to copy notes off other students. His eyes became tired after the long school day, and his classmates teased him about his appearance.

Things changed for Paul in October 2021, when his school was a participant in our School Eye Health Program, funded by the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) Child Blindness Program. The program has screened more than 86,000 school children in Kenya’s Uasin Gishu County by training teachers to identify students with visual impairments using a smartphone app called Peek Acuity. After the initial screening, students with possible eye conditions are referred to a nearby vision centre or hospital for further assessment.

After the screeners looked at Paul’s eyes, they advised him to go to our partner hospital in nearby Eldoret. When he told his mother, she initially hesitated due to her previous fears that he could lose his vision entirely. But Paul would not give up. “The boy insisted that I take him to hospital because technology has improved and things have changed,” his mother explained.

After consulting with the teacher who screened him, Paul’s mother took him to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital. As a partner in the School Eye Health Program, the hospital’s ophthalmic staff had recently received updated training in pediatric eye health as well as some new medical equipment. At the hospital, Paul was formally diagnosed with a squint, also called strabismus, a condition that causes misalignment of the eyes. He had surgery for the condition, the cost of which was covered through our program.

Today, Paul can see clearly and reads the blackboard with ease. Before surgery, he was always the second last in his class, but now he is among the top 10 of 40 students, and he says that kids no longer make fun of him. With his newly discovered love of math, Paul hopes to become an engineer someday.

With files from Caroline Ikumu

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