Every five seconds, someone in the world goes blind. Every minute, one of those is a child.
Seva Canada Society, a Vancouver-based charity, is on a mission to save their sight. It’s a mission that’s captivated Vancouver Island’s Dr. Marty Spencer for more than 20 years.
The Nanaimo ophthalmologist has been working with Seva (“service” in Sanskrit), since 1987, when he travelled to Nepal with his family to volunteer his skills in eye surgery. He found himself working with old technology or none at all: when electricity failed during a surgery, he had to operate by flashlight. But the rewards were greater than the challenges.
“There is no feeling like it, seeing those smiles after you restore people’s sight. When you go to those countries and see the poverty and how little people have, it just feels so good to help,” says the 62-year-old eye specialist.
Today, Dr. Spencer spends three to seven weeks a year travelling to India, Cambodia, Tibet, China, Guatemala and Malawi, treating patients with vision problems, performing cataract surgeries, and training local doctors to take over clinics and surgeries.
“There is a thrill to taking the patch off a patient one day and watching them see the light come in, but there is also a thrill in going back and seeing someone else doing the surgery. That’s how I measure my success now,” he says.
Seva’s been working to prevent blindness and restore the sight of citizens in the developing world for 27 years. The non-profit was founded first in the U.S. in 1978 and later in Vancouver in 1982. Today, it funds eye-care projects, medical staff and doctor training in India, Nepal, Tibet, Egypt, Tanzania, Guatemala and Cambodia.
The charity sends about $500,000 each year to eye programs abroad, and about 30 doctors and professionals go to help with training.
It is also involved in World Sight Day, which falls on Oct. 8 and this year focuses on the plight of visually impaired women and girls.
There are 314 million people with serious visual impairment around the world and 30 million are female. Of the 45 million blind in the world, 90 per cent live in developing countries. In Africa, the rate of childhood cataracts is six to 10 times higher than in Canada. Many cases are preventable, but the poor often lose their sight for want of $50 cataract surgery.
“About 80 per cent of these people don’t have to be blind. It’s something that is so easy and inexpensive to remedy, but the problem still continues to grow,” says Penny Lyons, executive director of Seva Canada since 2006.
The challenges blind women face in developing countries is compounded by their roles as breadwinners and farmers — without sight, their productivity and therefore their family’s welfare declines. But they are difficult to reach.
“There are huge barriers,” Dr. Spencer says. “You’d think that all you’d have to do is set up a hospital and people would beat the door down. But the hardest part is getting people on the operating table — finding people who are going blind, telling them it’s solvable, and overcoming their fear.”
Lyons says on a trip to Tibet she met with many eye-care patients who had seen their lives change.
“To a person that I met, man and woman, young and old, the gratitude that was expressed was so overwhelming that even two-and-a-half-years later it still makes me cry,” says Lyons, who’s visited projects in Nepal, India and Tanzania.
This fall, Seva is also launching a video contest for young Canadians to make three-minute films about blindness and eye care in the developing world. Three winning films will be selected after the Dec. 15 deadline and will be screened at the World Community Film Festival in eight cities, including Vancouver and Victoria.
They’ll also be honoured by having Seva restore the sight of one girl and woman in their name.
“The whole purpose of this is we wanted to educate the Canadian public on blindness and . . .the incredible inequities that exist in health care . . . for women, which of course is more pronounced in the developing world,” Lyons says.
The charity’s hosting an “Eye Opener” fundraiser at Heritage Hall on Main Street to mark World Sight Day Thursday, with food, entertainment and a silent auction. Tickets are $35, available by calling Seva Canada at 604-713-6622.
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To help fundraise for Seva you can download our Seva & Blenz Cares Coffee Order Form and collect coffee orders from your friends, family, colleagues, book club members and team members. It’s a simple way to multiply the power of saving sight and to get great coffee at the same time.
I think this is the fourth shipment of children’s frames I’ve sent in the last 2 years. Although adult glasses are easily procured in eastern Africa, children’s frames, especially the infant ones with hooks for behind the ears, are as precious as gold dust. Seva Canada and our partner in Africa, the 
The number one intervention for children with low vision is refraction and the prescription of the appropriate glasses. When I was in Tanzania in September 2008 attending a workshop on childhood cataract, I heard many sad and frustrating stories about the lack of kids’ glasses. A young girl was washing in the river and her glasses fell off and were lost. By the time she was seen by an eye specialist two years later and given a new pair of glasses, she had lost much of her vision, never to be recovered.
