The SightSavers Appeal 2008
Talk given by Russell Richards of SightSavers International
at the Women’s League Meeting at Hatfield in March 2008
May I be the first to offer you congratulations on reaching your Centenary.
It is a real privilege that SightSavers have been chosen as your Charity for your Centenary Year.
17 million people in the world go blind through cataracts needlessly.
125 million people suffer from River Blindness in West Africa.
80 million people are infection with Trachoma in East Africa.
100 million people are blind in all the poor countries/communities in the world.
When you start talking about these sorts of numbers its such an enormous amount of people and an enormous problem, that you what can you do about it? And when I travel overseas with SightSavers I come back. Not remembering the number of people in the projects I’ve seen and the projects supported by SightSavers, but I come back remembering 1 person I’ve met who has been helped through people like you.
Today I don’t want to talk about 17 million people or 80 million people but I want to talk about 2 people whose lives have been changed.
A wonderful young women named Charity
And a young girl called Sepu
When you first join Sightsavers you are told many statistics, but I statistic I remember is that today every child that goes blind, and thousands do, one every 60 seconds, half will die within 2 years.
Die because they live in poverty.
Imagine what its like for a parent with a child who goes blind, and you have to make the choice that the child can’t live because the family is so poor, and can’t afford for it to be part of the family – when you are poor and live in poverty every single person has to struggle and work to survive.
Imagine you are a Mother who has to make the decision to let a child died – its not because they don’t love the child, believe me when you are poor and live in poverty, if its possible you love your child even more. Children are everything to the survival of your family. If you get ill and don’t have children, there is no one to help you to feed, no one to help when you are ill. When you get old if you don’t have health children there is no-one to look after you because there’s no old age pension or social security for people living in poverty in the poor parts of the world, so children are precious.
Imagine having to make that choice.
When I was travelling North Kenya a few years ago, in a very dry arid area, I was visiting a project SightSavers support – we fund local projects and local people who are working in the local community, to help people overcome the problems they have. Visiting a project where we were trying to eradicate Trachoma.
Trachoma is a disease that spreads through poor communities. It’s the most infectious disease you can get. It particularly affects women and children. What happens is you get your eyes infected with Trachoma, and your eyes water and if you are cooking over a smokey fire they water, you wipe them, you touch your children and the disease spreads and spreads.
Trachoma is quite easy to control all it needs is a few drops of antibiotic ointment and you can cure it.
I visited a small health centre and walked into outpatients, and into the room where the nurse was looking at the patient. The first person I saw was Charity, and you see she had real problems with her eyes. They were puffed up and swollen and pussy. You could see every time she blinked she was in agony. When I asked her what it was like, what the disease felt like, she said it was like scratching her eyes with sandpaper because what happens when you get Trachoma is your eyes swell up and your eye lashes and eye lids swell so much that your eye lashes turn inwards and they scratch your eyes every time you blink. Imagine that, every time you blink your eyes get scratched and slowly destroys the cornea and slowly turns you blind.
The nurse that was with Charity said that very easily he could cure her disease, it just needed a few drops and the disease would go away.
I was fortunate enough to go to visit Charity in her house, and she wanted to take me down the road to meet a friend of hers who was a reasonably old lady who lived by herself in a house, and we went into the house and immediately you could see that she was totally blind – her eyes were absolutely shut tight, and she couldn’t see anything. Charity said she caught Trachoma about 20 years ago and there was no help in the area and nowhere she could go for help with her disease, and the pain got so bad that the only way she could stop the scratching of her eyes hurting was to stitch her eyes up with cotton, and she literally stitched her eyes up to stop herself blinking. Imagine being in that much pain and yet if she had been around today and she could have got to the clinic, a tube of ointment that cost just a £1 would have cured her. Imagine being able to stop hurting like that for just £1.
Every £1 you raise for us this year will be able to go towards eliminating Trachoma in East Africa and stop people living in such pain.
When you live in poverty nothing goes right for you, you get all the knocks in life because in East Africa people suffer from Trachoma because they live in dry, arid areas.
If you go to West Africa and you live in the areas where there’s lot of rain fall, you get fast flowing rivers and life should be idyllic, you should just be able to go down to the water, get enough to drink, get your carrel to drink water, irrigate your crops, wash and bathe in it. Do all the sort of things water gives you freedom from when you live in poverty. But in West Africa if you live on the banks of a fast flowing river you have 100% chance of going blind from river blindness, guaranteed, you will get river blindness and if not treated you will go blind in 15-20 years. There are 125 million people infected with the disease in West Africa.
But river blindness if the simplest disease in the world to control because what happens to you is when you live by a river, stand in the river and wash in it, a fly will come along called the Black Singalean Fly and it will bite you, on the back of your shoulders or legs, and it lays larva into your blood stream which quickly hatches out into tiny worms, which multiply by the thousands and you end up with tens of thousands of these worms going round your body. They hatch all sorts of organs in your body. They make your skin itch, pigmentation comes on your skin and when you see someone who has had the disease for a number of years they have nodules on their bodies, on their backs and legs and when you look closely they are actually moving because they are full of worms. Dreadful disease – and you go to the communities that have had the disease for many years, and not entered into the treatment programme and 80% of all the adults in the village are blind – imagine living in a community like that?
River Blindness is absolutely simple to eradicate and control because people have worms in their body and all you need to do to get rid is to de-worm simple as that- and it was discovered about 30 years ago that if you gave people the worming tablet it kills not just the River Blindness but every other worm that you’ve got and if you live in poverty in West Africa then believe me you have every worm you can think of in your body, it makes you lethargic, it makes you tired and it really affects the whole community, when people are full of worms. But if we can get the worm tablets to the people they take the tablet and literally within 24 hours the worms are dead and we can guarantee people won’t go blind. The problem of course is that if you take the table and are de-wormed, you can get bitten again in a week and the cycle starts all over again.
What SightSavers had to go and do was set up in West Africa a whole programme where we recruit villagers as volunteers to distribute the tablets for us so that we get the tablets into these isolated communities and people take the tablets annually. The great thing about the River Blindness campaign is that when we first started it back in the 1950s, we went to the manufacturers to see if they would help us. The pharmaceutical company – you don’t often hear good things about pharmaceutical companies – absolutely agreed they would help to eradicate River Blindness in West Africa and they guaranteed they would supply us, free of charge, the tablet as long as we needed it – I don’t think they knew what they were getting into when they made that guarantee because last year Sight Savers treated 15 million people in West Africa for River Blindness – 15 million we can guarantee won’t go blind. Its an incredible project we do. Its miraculous, that we can do that.
The volunteers in the villages do it free of charge; the tables are given to us, free of charge, so its an incredibly cheap programme and we estimate it costs us 5p per person to give them the tables for the charges of getting the tablet from the manufacturers to the distributors – 5p to guarantee someone won’t go blind.
Just think everytime you raise 5p over the next year someone won’t go blind.
My very first trip for Sightsavers was to India to a hospital SightSavers funded, just south of Calcutta.
My first trip and I went to the hospital and was asked if I wanted to see a cataract operating – of course I said I did, it was what I was there for and I was told to be at the operating theatre at a certain time – I turned up – no-one in the operating theatre – I had to put my mask, hat and gown on and slippers, and told to go in the theatre and to wait for everyone to come in, and I went into the state of the art theatre, air conditioned with 2 operating tables side by side with a stool in the middle. I learnt later the surgeon sat on the stool and whilst he operated on one, they were preparing the patient on the other and as he finished one, he literally wheeled himself round to the other one, and then back, and I literally watched him all day and he did 47 cataract operations that day, absolutely incredible.
But when I went in there was nobody in the theatre, and I think when they know they have someone whose has never seen a cataract operation before they make the most of it – surgeons in hospitals – I stood there, the first person who came in was the anaesthetist and that should have warned me, because with adults we don’t use anaesthetics, they lie there – a little bit of deadening drops in your eyes and they lie there in utter terror, for most of them it will be the first time they have every been in hospital, the first time they have seen a doctor, seen a nurse and I am quite certain you could chop their arm off and they still wouldn’t flinch because they’d be so frightened at what is happening to them, it’s a totally out of this world experience for poor people who have never seen anything like that.
The anaesthetist came in first, slight whirring in my brain that something wasn’t right, and then the surgeon came in, as I’ve said I think they quite enjoy it, he sat down and showed me the scalpel and how sharp they were and things like this, and then the nurse arrived with the first patient – a tiny little baby girl, whose name was Sepu – 2 months old. She’d been born with cataracts and was unable to see, the nurse put her down on this big long table, the anaesthetist put her to sleep and the surgeon picked up the scalpel and went towards Sepu’s eyes. I began to feel a little bit queasy at the thought of that knife going into that tiny baby’s eyes, and I felt a little bit sick, started to sway and I desperately wanted to get out of that operating theatre, but I am so pleased I didn’t because I watched that surgeon in 16 minutes remove the cataract from Sepu’s eyes and in 16 minutes he gave Sepu back her sight and almost certainly her life as well, because she came from an incredibly poor family and she would not have survived to a second birthday had she not had the gift of sight given to her.
It cost SightSavers £27 for that operation - £27 to give a child her sight and to guarantee she’d live.
Just remember that every £27 you raise during this next year will do that for a child, what an incredible gift to be able to do and thank you in advance for supporting SightSavers, and I hope to be here next year to receive a very nice big cheque from you.
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Information on how to contact Sightsavers for more information, of if any District or Branch etc would like a speaker:
Russell Richards
Community Groups Manager
SightSavers International
PO Box 208
Clevedon
Somerset BS21 7NE
Telephone 01275 349881E-mail:rrichard@sightsavers.org
Web site:www.sightsavers.org
E-mail Contact: Ann Hughes
