As part of my visit to the LRBT eye hospital, i had requested information about the support children from poor families received and how important it is for them to have their eyes checked. So far the focus had been on adults and their operations, so i was intrigued as to how serious children and their health was considered. I was advised that they suffer immensely because they do not have the support from parents to take them to a local clinic like LRBT, reason being the parent would have to take time off work, which means losing valuable money that pays for their food and the bills etc. An hour away from their fruit & veg stalls has a massive impact on families as it’s the difference between whether they can afford to feed the family that day or not.
Quite often these children who’s parents cannot afford to have them get their eyes checked, have children who suffer from headaches regularly and are underachieveing in their school subjects. They also lose interest in class because they have poor eye-sight, this could be they are long sighted or short sighted and struggling to read what is on the blackboard in front of them or what is written in the books in front of them.
Having learned the difficulties families face and even before being further educated on the health risks children go through, prior to arriving in Karachi i had donated money for a school to have their student’s eyes tested and this would be through LRBT. They would arrange for the consultants to come out to the school, and where struggling parents could not take the time to send their children to have their eyes checked, LRBT bought the service to the kids.
In the pictures above we arrived at the school in a very poor town, where mountains of rubbish were only metres away, cattle roaming around sat in their own faeces and dogs walking around unleashes carrying rabies as well as the thousands of mosquitoes which were unavoidable. The scenes were very upsetting, but children need to be educated and without such facilities regardless of how poor, the children would end on the streets or in even worse circumstances.
As we entered the building, we were taken through the courtyard where children were having their eyes tested, the children were queuing up to be checked by one of the LRBT consultants a volunteer for the organisation, you will notice they do not have separate facilities for this process, but cleared out a classroom for this to take place.
A young boy in the 2nd and 3rd picture was having his eyes tested and they discovered he had a serious cataract. This is how important the screening is for these kids, if donations are not made like this and arrangements made for this screening process to take place, this poor child would never have known about the cataract and could be in threat of losing his eye sight. I was advised the parents were being informed immediately and that if they could not get him to the hospital asap then LRBT would be able to arrange for him to picked up and driven to the hospital.
This was just one school and only the start of the screening process, how many more schools and how many more children at such a young age are suffering, but a parent cannot afford to have their child seen by a specialist. These children need this type of support, they need to have their eyes checked and if they need glasses or any operation they need to be seen immediately because they are at high risk of suffering from blindness at a very early age.
I continued to walk around the school and met with the school principle and she talked us through the processes and the difficulties she faces with advising the children and getting them to see an eye specialist. If the children are advised to wear glasses, the lenses are provided but as this is something they are not used to, they complain of headaches and stop wearing them. The teachers were advised when this happens, to let the child know this will happen for up to 10days whilst their eyes adjust, they should encourage the child to wear them for 10days continuously so they can adjust and they should find they have no further problems there after.
The teachers also advised that if girls need to wear glasses at such a young age, this is a serious worry for the parents, because they say if their daughter needs to wear glasses, they will have trouble finding her a husband when she is older, due to them seeing this as the child having a disability, so they complain and refuse to let their daughter wear them. The teachers again were advised to keep the glasses at school and ensure the girls wear then during school time, when they leave at the end of the school day they hand in their glasses to be looked after by the teachers.
It was incredible learning about the reasons parents would avoid their child wearing glasses, the challenges children face for not being able to see an eye specialist and some of them grow up never having had their eyes checked. However, it was more concerning that the lack of education in these parts of Karachi and in Pakistan that these problems came down too and it is the children who suffer the most and why blindness in Pakistan is at an all time high.
Education is so important and it was clear to see, that due to lack of understanding they are not supported as well as they should be. Parents are so poor they were never given the opportunity to be able to go school, whilst these kids are becoming more aware, they are still struggling due to poverty in this country and with no government funding they are forced to depend on charity organisations such as LRBT.
SaimasCharityTravels 