A huge thank you to Shelagh Smith, Rob McClure and all the people in Whitehorse who made last night's fundraiser for Seva Canada (www.seva.ca) a big success. About 80 people attended and raised $1,000 for the Kham Eye Centre in Dartsedo.
Tibet has the highest rate of blindness in the world. Cataract is the leading cause of blindness in the Kham region, as it is in other Tibetan regions. Cataracts can be removed, and sight restored, with a relatively simple and highly cost-effective operation costing about $50, yet the cataract surgical coverage in the area is just 40%; 60% of patients remain untreated. Seva is trying to change this.
A 50-bed eye hospital, the Kham Eye Center, is currently being built in Dartsedo and will open in 2009. The Kham Eye Center will be a non-profit eye care institution specializing in clinical services, research, teaching and prevention and treatment of eye disease. Seva is funding human resource development, technical and managerial mentorship, and provision of ophthalmic equipment, instruments and supplies. The Kham Eye Care Center will have a multitiered pricing system to make the eye care more affordable and accessible to all patients in the community. The ultimate goal of the Kham Eye Center is to build a high-quality, sustainable, accessible, affordable eye care system.
It's pretty amazing to think that for the price of a condo in Vancouver (even after the slump), you can equip an entire hospital, train the staff, help set up 10 vision centers and provide medical materials and surgical supplies for 4 years. Cost: $825,000. Gifts of sight for thousands of Tibetans for generations to come: priceless!
The goals are:
- to conduct a minimum of 14,000 cataract sight restoring surgeries over the next 5 years;
- to establish 10 vision centers by 2010;
- to train 10 eye doctors and 10 county level nurses;
- to establish the Center as a standard national eye hospital, using state-of-the-art technology;
- to become the model eye care program in the Kham region;
- to become an eye care training center;
- and to develop as a community ophthalmology center.
Thanks again to all the folks in Whitehorse for your generosity and compassion.
Grateful Tibetan patients at a Seva eye camp in 2008
