A special guest post from Battambang, Cambodia by Dr. Gary Barth, ophthalmologist and Seva volunteer. Originally posted Jan 21, 2011 When those in the West think of Cambodia, invariably we image the magnificent Buddhist structures of Angkor Wat and the hellish regime and killings of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot. Cambodia is now politically stable but the damage of two lost generations of teachers and students and doctors has left a severely under trained medical care system. The Khmer Rouge were so intent on destroying anyone with education that they even targeted for killing anyone wearing glasses. As a result, there is a dramatic shortage of doctors, particularly specialists as a result of the mass murders.

Cambodia has only nine local ophthalmologists serving a population of 14 million people. There are about 168,000 Cambodians who are blind.  As is true in most developing countries, the majority of the blindness is due to preventable or treatable diseases, such as cataracts. Probably 80% of the blindness in Cambodia is due to cataracts. Seva has been working in Cambodia for 14 years and has helped train over half of the ophthalmologists in the country.

My wife and I left for Cambodia on January 14, 2011, under the auspices of Seva Foundation in the US [Seva Canada’s sister organization]. Seva has been assigned the three rural northwest provinces by the Cambodian government – Siem reap, Banteay Meanchey and Battambang. Since the government is unable to supply eye services to all of the provinces, they have contracted with non-governmental agencies to raise money and coordinate care in the various provinces. For instance, the Helen Keller Foundation, like Seva, applied to assist in the blindness prevention program in Cambodia. The Cambodian government assigned the Helen Keller Foundation three provinces to support. There were two main reasons I chose to align my skills with Seva. First they have 35-year experience teaching eye surgery in developing countries. Since they were founded, they have facilitated more than two million charity cataract surgeries. Second, their mission is to train local staff how to accomplish high quality/high volume surgical eye care. Currently Seva is responsible for the training and performance of 25% of the cataract surgeries done in the whole country.  In addition to teaching techniques for excellent surgery, the Seva staff educates the local team about how to screen for cataracts in the villages, as well as, how to determine who can pay something so that another can get a free surgery. Another Seva mission, that played a role in my choosing to work with them, is their focus on actively assisting women to get eye care. Women and men are equally afflicted with ocular problems but women remain disproportionately handicapped. There are real financial and cultural barriers to women getting access to cataract surgery. Seva works hard at all the levels of intervention to bring quality eye care and surgery to the women of Cambodia. In short, Seva’s goal is to make these three Cambodia provinces self-sufficient so that the Seva team can move to another area or another country to teach and support.