Clean water is essential for general health, eye health included. Without readily-available clean water, people can’t wash or sanitize, causing the spread of diseases.

In Zambia, there are still thousands of children, women and men who are suffering from the blinding disease, trachoma.

Trachoma is the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness. Caused by bacterial infection, it spreads easily through contact with eye discharge from infected people on hands, towels and clothing, and also through direct transmission by flies. Children are most susceptible to trachoma, and because of their role as primary caregivers, women are three times more likely than men to be blinded by the disease.

But there’s a solution! The SAFE strategy.

Thanks to your support, we’ll ramp up our efforts to implement the SAFE strategy to eliminate blinding trachoma in Zambia. SAFE stands for Surgery, Antibiotics, Face washing and hygiene education, and Environmental change.

Thanks to you, we’ll develop borehole programs in vulnerable communities in Zambia. Establishing each borehole program will include identifying a viable location; drilling the borehole; analyzing the water quality; training and equipping local villagers as pump minders; monitoring and evaluating the program; building the capacity of the village water committee; distributing antibiotics, and educating the community on eye health and general health.

By providing villages with fresh water, not only will you help improve sanitation and prevent the spread of trachoma and other disease, but you’ll also provide families with the means to grow crops and raise livestock. And by supporting our community outreach and eye health education programs, you’ll also help us identify those with eye problems and refer them for treatment.

In addition, the provision of fresh water assists in the development of education. Villages with fresh water attract teachers and, as children (especially girls) will no longer have to spend long hours walking to find water, they’ll be able to attend school. In the coming years, entire communities will be transformed, thanks to you!

What has our team in Zambia been up to so far this year?

Now that the rainy season has ended, we’re conducting needs assessments in Sinazongwe district and surrounding districts to identify communities at greatest risk of trachoma and to begin identifying viable drilling locations. We’re working with the Ministry of Local Government and Housing to determine the number of households and the total population that will benefit from the boreholes. Depending on the needs of the districts, we’ll select our target communities.

We’re also in discussions with the Department of Water Affairs to see if we can partner with them again. In the past, they’ve contributed to our borehole projects, allowing us to expand our work to additional communities.

We promote community buy-in right from the start. Once our target communities have been identified, we’ll engage with community members to ensure they take ownership of the project, and to collaboratively develop borehole programs based on the specific needs of each community.

With all our programs, our goal is to educate communities and empower them to take responsibility for their eye health needs. In doing so, we can create sustainable programs that communities will continue to benefit from, even after our formal partnership with them has ended. By investing in communities at the onset of the program, we can ensure that your generous gifts will be used in the best possible way!

Your support will help hundreds of thousands in Zambia, but there’s still more work to be done! Please help us continue the fight against avoidable blindness by giving a gift. Thank you for all your support — For All the World to See!

The post Together we’ll wash away blindness in Zambia! appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

Our Kenya programs created a tremendous impact in 2016, especially those benefitting children. Together with Seeing is Believing (SiB) and other organizations, we continued an innovative Child Eye Health project to reduce avoidable blindness and visual impairment in children. In 2016, we focused on service delivery, clinical assessment, field monitoring, advocacy and sustainability. We screened over 67,000 children for eye health problems and treated more than 3,000 children. We also assisted with ophthalmic clinical officer assessments and participated in advocacy meetings with educators. With targets and sustainability strategies now in place, the Child Eye Health project was handed over to the ministries of health and education, who will provide continuous eye care services for children.

Thanks to our GivingTuesday 2015 donors, we screened nearly 20,000 students from over 40 different schools in Narok County in 2016. Over 500 students were treated for various eye conditions. Teachers and ophthalmic clinical officers also educated students on eye health and sanitation.

With our partners, we scaled up the PEEK school screening program in Trans Nzoia County. PEEK (Portable Eye Examination Kit) is an application enabling teachers to screen students for vision problems using a mobile phone. Thanks to funding through SiB, we implemented the PEEK system at Kitale Eye Unit and two satellite clinics, and provided refresher training for teachers who had been part of our pilot project the previous year. In 2016, over 40,000 students were screened across 70 schools, and nearly 870 of the children were treated for various eye health issues.

With support from SiB, we continued to strengthen our community outreach programs in the former Rift Valley Province. In 2016, over 100,000 patients were screened for eye problems. In collaboration with the county government, we established a new eye unit at Huruma Sub-County Hospital. We also supported training for three ophthalmic nurses and one cataract surgeon.

And finally, with support from The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, we continued implementing the SAFE strategy to eliminate the blinding eye disease trachoma. Working with Narok County Referral Hospital, we trained 121 community health workers as Trachomatous Trichiasis (TT) case finders to help identify those suffering from the late stage of the disease, refer people for surgery and follow up with patients. Over 41,000 people were screened for TT, of which 358 were identified and 273 received surgeries. We also educated 15 school communities on sanitation and eye health, and trained 30 community health volunteers to facilitate Community-Led Total Sanitation programs. This resulted in the construction of 11 new latrines, increasing latrine coverage by 24 percent in the targeted communities.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? Just how much good we can do together? So much work has already been done, but there’s still a lot more to do! To help us continue our work in Kenya, please consider making a gift through our Gift Guide. No gift is too small! Together we can eliminate avoidable blindness – For All the World to See!

The post 2016 Highlights from Kenya: Tremendous impact was made thanks to people like you! appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

Growing up, do you remember what some of your biggest challenges were? Did any of them make you want to give up and walk away?

Now, try to imagine the challenge of growing up blind in one eye without access to professional eye care services.

This was young Simon’s experience. He suffered an injury as a child, causing him to go blind in his right eye.

Simon is a 10-year-old boy, who lives with his family in a village near the Maasai Mara in Kenya. Despite having just one eye, Simon has always been ambitious. From a young age, he would always tell his proud parents that his dream job was to become a tour guide like the ones that would drive by his home on their way to the Maasai Mara. Simon’s determination to go to school never faltered as he worked towards his goal!

But one day, the pride Simon’s parents had for him was eclipsed by fear. Suddenly, their son’s left eye developed an excruciatingly painful infection! At first, his eye reddened and started to water, and soon his eyelashes turned inward! With every blink, his lashes scraped painfully against his eyeball.

Unable to so much as open his remaining eye, Simon couldn’t keep up with his studies. Eventually, he was forced to drop out of school.

Simon was afraid for his future. Without the medical care he needed, his dream seemed unachievable.

“When I lost my right eye, I kept going. But when the other eye became infected I thought I would go blind! I thought my family would reject me like I was a cursed child!”

His parents tried every traditional medicine available to them, including a folk remedy where they put tobacco in his eye to cure it. But nothing worked.

Full of sorrow, all Simon could do was take care of his father’s livestock, and even that had to be done with close supervision.

“My dream was shattered. My parents couldn’t help me anymore.”

But then something incredible happened! Thanks to the support of generous people like you, James, one of Operation Eyesight’s community health workers, was able to come to Simon’s village. When James screened Simon, he immediately diagnosed the infection as the blinding disease trachoma.

James promptly referred Simon to our partner hospital in Narok for surgery – and his left eye was saved!

Thanks to the generous support of donors like you, this was all made possible at no cost to his family!

Simon has now returned to school, and his teacher is impressed with how well he’s doing! “He’s so eager to catch up with the rest of the class,” his teacher says, “that he sometimes forgets he only has one eye! I’m very happy with his progress.”

Since the surgery, Simon’s dream has changed. “Now that I’m back in school, I want to become a doctor so I can help my family like the doctors helped me. Thank you so much!”

Simon’s parents are overwhelmed with pride over their son’s strong character.

“Even though we gave up after trying everything we could think of, Simon didn’t give up. When the doctors said his left eye would improve after surgery, he didn’t hesitate to get treated. For someone who had already lost his right eye, that was very brave of him.”

Simon is so grateful to have his sight back in his left eye! And this was all made possible by donors like you. Just think, thanks to your support, one day Simon will be able to become a doctor and help more people like him!

There are many children like Simon with big dreams. For just $50, you can help someone like Simon make his or her dreams come true by making a donation today! Simon didn’t give up, and we certainly won’t either!

The post Giving up isn’t an option! appeared first on Operation Eyesight.

Many young girls in rural Zambia are not as fortunate. Every day, these girls have to worry about how long it will take to fetch clean water for their families, whether they can make the trip in time to go to school – and how they can stay safe from animal predators during a trek that can be several kilometers long!

In the Southern Province of Zambia in the Sinazongwe district, there’s no easy access to clean water. Although sparsely populated, many villages are situated in the mountainous part of the district that receives very little rainfall each year.

In the past, the communities were only able to obtain drinking water from shallow wells, dug in the banks of perennial river beds. Some of the villages are near freshwater Lake Kariba – but that lake is also infested with hungry crocodiles! Certainly not an ideal situation.

Until recently, if a community couldn’t afford to pay to drill their own borehole, they were forced to share their limited water supply with livestock. Proximity to the cattle and goats also brought flies, which led to the spread of sickness and disease like blinding trachoma.

In areas where water is scarce, it’s usually women and girls who are responsible for fetching water. This often involves long, exhausting walks to and from the water source – usually with the very real danger of being attacked by wild animals. In the Sinazongwe district, it was so dangerous that not a week would go by without hearing of a life lost due to animal predators! It meant girls either missed a lot of school or weren’t enrolled at all.

I’m sure many girls thought that they’d never be able to improve their futures. But thankfully, we have amazing donors who are committed to changing this situation. Because of the incredible generosity of people like you, 96 water boreholes to date have been drilled in the district!

Operation Eyesight’s well programs are so much more than simply drilling a hole in the ground. Establishing each well program includes:

• identifying a viable location;
• drilling the borehole;
• analyzing the water quality;
• training and equipping local villagers as pump minders;
• monitoring and evaluating the program;
• mobilizing the community and building the capacity of the village water committee;
• distributing antibiotics to fight the blinding eye disease, trachoma; and
• educating the community on eye health and general health.

Having ready access to clean potable (drinkable) water provides families with enough water that they can spare some for washing hands and faces – and this improved hygiene, in turn, helps prevent disease. And being closer to water also helps free up enough time from their household duties for girls to attend school.

Today, many more girls in the district are attending classes safely and on time. They go to school with plastic containers so they can carry water home from the borehole when their classes end. They know going to school means they can learn to read and write, which will improve their chances for a better life someday.

The girls at Nyanga school in Sinazongwe are especially grateful and excited to continue their studies. “We are still in the primary school, and we look forward to continuing with our education to become teachers or nurses so we can also help our people in this district.”

And all this progress was made possible by generous people just like you. Thank you!

You can help give more girls the chance to live their childhood, to follow their dreams and build a future for themselves. Help provide them with clean water – give a donation and support our water programs today!

The post Fresh water can restore girls’ futures! appeared first on Operation Eyesight.