Six year old Kristian and her family were some of the lucky ones to benefit from the recent visit to their homeland of Sumba, West Timor, by a team of Australian optometrists, supported by Optometry Giving Sight. Team member and optometrist Peter Lewis from Victoria, Australia, tells the story of this visit...

18 year old Donglian had never had her eyes checked before a local team of eye care professionals came to her school in a poor, remote mountainous area of Lechang province. Although she had blurred vision sometimes, she hadn’t told her teacher as she was the type of girl who never liked to complain about things. But her close friends felt it was their duty to speak up. “As her classmates, we should help her. In addition, she is a good friend to me,” one of them said.

Fatuma had to wait until she turned 18 before she could register with the local Vision Centre in Mtwara, Tanzania. Fatuma had known for a while that she wasn’t seeing well. She had been struggling at school, approaching the blackboard at the end of class to record important details rather than admitting to her problem. When she was finally able to visit the centre, she wasn’t sure what to expect.

When two young brothers heard about visiting optometrists, they travelled for 40 minutes on poor roads on a motorbike taxi to Waikabubak Sumba Hospital in East Timor. Their family paid 20,000 RP (AU$2) each for the journey – about a day’s income. When 14 year old Susanto was examined, he was R -7.50 (essentially he could see clearly up to 12cms away from him in his right eye and just 9cm in his left eye).  His 10 year old brother, Rivaldo, could see even less. The brothers were functionally blind and had spent their childhood living in a dense fog.