How eye doctors are helping China and Pakistan see clearly to dream again
Efforts to build the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor have not been without setbacks, but it’s hard to argue with a volunteer effort to bring sight back to hundreds of Karachi’s poorest residents
Having your sight taken away, a sense most of us take for granted, could easily be described as a living nightmare – imagine going through it as a seven-year-old boy in a government-run school in Karachi, Pakistan.
“I’ve had trouble reading books,” said second-grader Master Junaid, a resident of Kausar Niazi Colony, one of Karachi’s poorest areas. “I had a dream to become a doctor to serve humanity. However, cataracts came as a great hurdle to transform my dream into reality,” he told This Week in Asia.
Not surprisingly, his parents couldn’t afford to help him. “Cataract treatment costs US$450 to US$1,000 for a single eye. It was beyond our reach,” his father said.
Fortunately for Junaid, a nine-member team of Chinese doctors who went to Pakistan earlier this month were in a position to help him and hundreds of others suffering similar eye problems.
Supported by the medical boards of China and Pakistan and fully backed by the Hong Kong-based Express Foundation, the physicians went to Karachi on a 10-day volunteer effort called “Brightness Journey of Healthy Express”. The team conducted free cataract operations on 529 patients, including Junaid.
The surgeries were performed at the Pakistan Eye Bank Society (PEBS) charity hospital in North Karachi between January 10 and January 19.
