British charity brings miracle of sight in just 20 minutes
Two-month-old Savira’s smiles have been lost on her grandmother since the day she was born. The curious expressions and large brown eyes which enchant Savira’s parents, aunts and uncles are invisible to Nahid Akhtar. Four years ago, Mrs Akhtar’s world began to blur and then cloud until she was unable to see more than patterns of light and dark. Like an estimated 12 million people worldwide, Mrs Akhtar had been blinded by cataracts.
The condition, where a build-up of protein clouds the eye’s lens, can account for more than half of all blindness in developing countries such as Pakistan. The chances of cataracts grow with age, particularly after 50, but it can also affect children.
For those afflicted, it is lifechanging, often robbing them of a livelihood, an income or independence. For Mrs Akhtar, the onset of cataracts saw her go from the person who ran the family household in the city of Rawalpindi, to someone who feels helpless. Her plight has been worsened by a stroke.
“I used to manage each and every thing in my house and now I feel I am useless because of my illness,” she told The Telegraph.
Yet for all the devastating effect such blindness can have, it is a condition that can be treated easily and cheaply with a 20-minute operation.
Last week The Telegraph witnessed the culmination of a four-year British-funded charity campaign that has restored the sight of a million people. Sightsavers’ Million Miracles raised enough money to pay for a million cataracts surgeries, transforming lives around the world.
Mrs Akhtar was one of the final recipients of the £32million campaign last week at an eye clinic on the main road between Islamabad and Lahore. “For the last nine months I have not been able to see anything,” the 55-year-old mother of six said before her surgery. It’s just a perception of light. I’m hardly able to see the faces, I can just see that someone is there.
“I want to see my children, I want to work, I want to see my family. There’s one granddaughter, Savira, I have never been able to see.”
Years of severe diabetes had already started to weaken Mrs Akhtar’s eyesight before the cataracts struck. Her stroke left her partially paralysed and reliant on a wheelchair.
“I went into depression, I couldn’t work at all, I couldn’t meet my friends, I could not go outside. When I lost my vision, I lost my independence. I stay at home, I listen to whatever my family members are talking about and once a day I move near the window and listen to the sound of people. When I only stay in the room, I feel suffocated.”
Her husband, a taxi driver, had been forced to give up work to care for his wife. Mehmood Ahmad, 58, said: “Initially I took it as normal that her vision was going but when it got severe and she couldn’t do anything, I got worried.”
Sightsavers, originally known as the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind, was founded by Sir John Wilson in 1950. The charity works in more than 30 countries and last year carried out 14 million eye examinations and gave more than 157 million treatments for debilitating diseases.
Its Million Miracles fundraising campaign began in 2014 and was largely funded by donations from the British public, topped up with £3.3million from the Department for International Development.
Pakistan, the world’s sixth-most populous nation, is home to one of Sightsavers’ largest operations, where it works with networks of clinics to carry out the procedures.
The Mandra eye hospital 45 minutes’ drive south of Pakistan’s capital is one of 18 run by one of Sightsavers’ local partners, the Layton Rahmatulla Benevolent Trust (LRBT). The trust was set up by Graham Layton, a British Army officer who went on to have a successful
‘No man, woman or child should have to go blind because they cannot afford cataract treatment’
engineering career in Pakistan, and his best friend, Zaka Rahmatulla.
LRBT has grown into the largest provider of eyecare in Pakistan with the simple goal that: “No man, woman or child should go blind because they cannot afford the treatment.”
Daily queues of walk-in patients to the Mandra hospital give an idea of the scale of the work Sightsavers and LRBT carry out.
Each day Mandra sees 250 to 300 patients, many who have travelled 50 miles or more, and carries out around 50 surgeries.
For each patient, life could potentially be transformed by 20 minutes in Mandra’s operating theatre.
Ruqayya Bibi, a 60-year-old mother of three sons, said she hoped the surgery would give her an income again. Her eyesight had deteriorated badly over the past eight months.
“I belong to a very poor family. I go into the houses of other people to wash their utensils, but it’s started to get very difficult. They started to say you are not washing these well and the reason was I couldn’t see.”
Patients are treated under local anaesthetic and ultrasound is used to break down the cloudy lens before the bits are removed and a new artificial lens is implanted. One eye is usually operated on first and the second eye can be corrected a month or two later.
Not everyone can make it to the clinic. Medics have noticed that one under-represented group has been the disabled and Sightsavers and LRBT are making their services more accessible.
Only six hours after the operation, Mrs Akhtar was ready to have the bandages removed. Sitting in the front room in her home off a Rawalpindi alleyway, the gentle movements of the optometrist were watched by an expectant crowd of relatives.
With the bandages gone, he peered into the reddened and teary eye. “How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked as the room remained silent. “Three,” she replied correctly. He tried again, raising two digits, and she answered correctly again.
The room dissolved into children’s excited giggles and Mrs Akhtar’s husband began to cry.
Three days later she was still wearing dark glasses, but her bearing had markedly changed. Mrs Akhtar seemed more alert and alive. In her arms was Savira. “My grandchildren have been here for the past 24 hours and I can see them and talk to them, and it makes me very happy.”