Fighting Blindness In Ethiopia has made four trips to this ever needy country and treated those who live in a rural area of the land. 2006 was our first visit with a team of four doctors and three nurses to the town of Bahirdar. That was an experience of a lifetime for all the team. When we saw the number of patients who streamed into the centre every day we could not hide our emotion but cried. Even I as an Ethiopian have not seen such poverty and so many people with eyesight problems. There were over three to four hundred people coming to the clinic every day and we could only treat a maximum of 50-60 operation a day. We were only there four days because the team has taken five working day off their regular duty.
We worked from dawn to dusk and managed to operate on 148 patients in four days and we would have done more but ran out of intraocular lenses and there was a shortage of eye equipment. There were only two microscopes to be shared among four doctors and we had four cataract sets to our name.
After a year our own church in London has given us money to buy three more cataract sets and we managed to borrow three microscopes from Addis when we went to Nekamte in 2007, another area where there is no eye centre. This time we gave our best to operate as much as we could but it was a public holiday and not enough information was given for patients to hear about the eye camp. Again we only managed to operate on 172 patients. We were very disappointed not to reach our target of 250.
In 2008 we went to the same area because some of our team doctors had taken cataract samples for studies. We have bought more cataract sets, all in all ten sets now, so that helped us reach our target even more. After five days we managed to operate on 257 patients. This thrilled everyone's heart and made so many patients happy as result. By now all the team members had given me their word to come to Ethiopia and help whatever the cost. The people in Scotland are very kind and generous. They contributed all that we needed to go back again and again. People in churches and patients in Scottish clinics give money to the team doctors to help every year.
This year we moved to the southern part of the country to an area with a population of over 3 million people. Even though they did not screen enough patients before our team arrived, because we have now learned more and have enough equipment and microscopes to utilise all our skill, we managed to operate on 298 patients within five days. One of the leading surgeons had to come home because of bereavement in the family after just two days. We would have done more if he could stayed.
We learned there are so many people affected with different kinds of eye diseases that one cannot meet what is required for every one. About 40% of the patients we saw in Hosaina and the surrounding area are suffering with complication of trachoma. Some of them came with staphyloma cornea, trichi-asis entropeaon and ectropeaon.
One of the duties of the team is to screen all those to be operated on even though they have been screened prior to our arrival. To avoid any mistakes we screen every one. We only operate on those who have passed our screening and are ready for operation. If anyone comes with an infection or any other medical problem that patient will be disqualified for surgery. Because of the time factor we do not operate under general anaesthesia. This procedure would take more time and there are no other facilities.
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