Sight for Mozambique - LIGHT FOR THE WORLD provides basic equipment for 4 eye care facilities in Mozambique.

Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world. In vast areas of the country, the population does not have access to eye care.
For four years now, LIGHT FOR THE WORLD has been carrying out pioneering work in this country:
In Beira, a provincial capital in central Mozambique, an eye clinic was opened and now provides care for some 2,000 patients, per month, who are blind or have other eye diseases. Approximately 4,500 people who cannot make the trip to Beira are examined and treated in field programmes each year.

LIGHT FOR THE WORLD is now expanding its work within the framework of the National Blindness Prevention Plan in cooperation with the Ministry of Health, local authorities and other NGOs and thus also its aid to people with blindness and eye diseases in Mozambique: Four eye departments will be provided with basic equipment, instruments and medications, including the eye department at the clinic in Lichinga, the capital of Niassa Province. With one million inhabitants, this province – which is among the poorest in the country – used to have no eye care facilities at all.

Now, ophthalmologist Dr. Chetan Swarup can examine patients and do surgery as well.

Several months ago, the only "examination instrument" was a weak desk lamp. Help was provided quickly, and the instruments and medications provided have now enabled regular eye treatments to take place. In January 2007, the first patients in the history of the provincial hospital underwent cataract surgery.

Aurora can see again! in Mozambique, more and more people can be operated on cataract.

There are still many difficulties to overcome: Like everywhere else in the country, there are still too few eye care specialists in this province. Nurses also have to be trained. Local people still have to be informed that eye examinations and treatments are now available. Moreover, field programs in the hard-to-reach districts of the province still have to be organized and executed. .

Thanks to the support provided from Austria, blind people whose sight has been restored will no longer be an exception in Niassa Province.
This support helps people like Aurora Seueo, who was blind for four years. She had to sell her livestock, her fields lay fallow, and she was forced to rely on support and money from her brothers.
After four years without sight, Aurora learned of an ophthalmologist who could restore people's vision even if they didn’t have any money.
The journey took two days, but at the end Aurora was rewarded with the greatest gift she had ever received: her vision. The LIGHT FOR THE WORLD doctor diagnosed her with cataracts and operated on Aurora, exchanging her clouded lenses with clear artificial ones. Now life is completely different for this 70-year-old woman: She can tend her fields, plans to buy several chickens, and will be able to give back what she received over the last few years.
"I can see again! No gift could have ever made me happier."