I remember being terrified as a kid by a stunningly cheesy B-movie called The Crawling Eye, in which a radioactive cloud on a mountaintop hides a deadly secret.
But the Flying Eye is much more benevolent. It's a world-class eye hospital built right into a DC-10 aircraft, and it's run by ORBIS International, a non-profit organization dedicated to saving sight worldwide. Earlier this month, World Sight Day was observed on October 8th, and I'm kicking myself for not blogging about this earlier since this year's theme was Gender and Eye Health -- equal access to care.
How does sight relate to women's lives? Here's what I learned from ORBIS International:
[N]early two thirds of blind people worldwide are woman and girls....In many places, men have twice the access to eye care as women....But equal access to eye care could reduce the rate of blindness in poor countries. An estimated 45 million children and adults are blind worldwide...and every year between 1 and 2 million more will lose their sight.
It's reported that 75% of these cases are due to preventable blindness; and many could have their eyesight restored with access to proper eyecare. Without some form of intervention, it's estimated that by the year 2020 blindness will affect more than 76 million people.
The Flying Eye Hospital offers that kind of intervention through volunteer medical professionals who train local medical teams to provide care. Inside the Flying Eye Hospital, local doctors watch and learn from surgeries involving the latest medical techniques. They then take that knowledge back to their own communities.
Close your eyes and imagine a day of work without sight. Women worldwide are tasked with caring for their families, cooking, cleaning, raising children; think how much harder it would be to do all that without benefit of vision.
ORBIS has put together Eye Reports to show the work of the Flying Eye Hospital. Like any other non-profit, they appreciate donations, but interestingly enough they can also accept donations of frequent flyer miles from United Airlines and AsiaMiles, enabling an ORBIS doctor to travel and perform sight-saving work.
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