Lighting the darkness

We drove a truck for four to five hours into the countryside of Malawi. It was a four-wheel drive where we had removed all the seats to fit about 30 people on the floor. We only had enough resources to visit once a year. We travelled to four centres, usually schools or health clinics, to pick up patients for cataract surgery. They had to be legally blind with a vision of 3/60, which is worse than legal blindness in Ireland (6/60). Once they were 3/60 in both eyes, they were eligible to get into our truck.

One man I saw was 45 years old, with a vision of 6/36 in his better eye. He had five children and could barely walk into the room unassisted. Yet we had to tell him: ‘Sorry, we can’t put you in the truck. We can only take people who are worse and we don’t know when we can come back to get you’. He just sat down and cried on the spot. This would never happen anywhere else. It was absolutely heartbreaking.