Eye Camp: Sensory Overload!

I asked Dr. Chandra why he chose to focus on eye care. He replied by saying there was a need and he filled that need. He continued to explain that the poor can not afford to go into the city for medical treatment, not to mention that many would simply be afraid to venture away from the familiarity of their rural villages. He further explained that when dealing with the gradual onset of blindness, many of the poor, illiterate people he meets think that blindness is merely part of old age and dying.

When Dr. Chandra moved to Kakinada 25 years ago, there wasn't a medical facility for eye treatments, so he built one. To date, the Sankurathri Foundation has seen more than 2.5 million out-patients and performed more than  205, 500 cataract operations at the Srikiran Institute of Ophthalmology. That was 21 years ago.

Day 3 of our stay - Saturday, December 28 - we were busy like we've never been before. It was a day of sensory overload for all our senses. We left the compound at 8am, van packed with our recording equipment, Dominique, Francis and myself in the middle seat, our driver Lova and Chandra in the front and Raju with our equipment in the back seats. It took an hour of weaving through villages, maneuvering our way around buses, decorated trucks, three-wheeled motorized minibuses, motorcycles and scooters carrying familes of three or four at once, herds of cows and the many pedestrians before we arrived at the Eye Camp.

Three times a week, Chandra and his team head out into the villages to meet and give medical eye exams to the poor. These people come reluctantly, with hesitation and fear of the unknown, but word had gotten out to them that the people working for the Sankurathri Foundation were coming so they made their way in the hopes that they could be helped. It seems that Dr. Chandra and the name of his foundation are synonymous with trust for many of these people.

The technicians who work at the Srikiran Eye Institute - high school graduates who have been selected for a two-year internship scholarship program of training to be eye-clinic technicians at the Srikiran Eye Institute - set up in the courtyard of the humble grounds of a public school that is no more than four rooms of concrete walls - two on each side of a packed-earth ground that is the courtyard where tables have been set up under a multi-coloured canopy held up with large bamboo poles.

I will allow the following images speak for themselves of our time at the Eye Camp. In the evening, approximately 50 of the people you see in these images were selected as suitable candidates to receive treatment; mainly, cataract surgery. They were transported by bus that very afternoon to the Eye Institute where Hema and some other women fed them a warm meal of rice and curried radish and water. They then underwent pre-operation preparation for their eyes and went to sleep on bamboo mats in a large room on the second floor of the hospital.

Today, they will have their operations. Tomorrow, they will see for the first time in a very long time. And one more point I almost forgot to mention: these operations are done free of cost.