We just returned from an extraordinary trip to India.
This report will show you how our charity is helping thousands of children no one else will.
One of them is a 9-year-old girl who became blind when she turned 3.
For the past six years, Priya’s father went from hospital to hospital, begging for someone to help his little girl get surgery to restore her eyesight.
This $300 surgery is something he could never afford as a poor farmer supporting a family of six on $40 a month. Despite his pleas, no one would help them.
A month ago, his neighbor showed him a small newspaper ad offering free surgery for the blind. He and his daughter, Priya, traveled more than 100 kilometers to reach our partner hospital.
I happened to be there visiting our partner hospital and I got to meet Priya and her dad, interview them and take these pictures.
The surgery Priya waited six years for took just 15 minutes.
The next morning when she opened her eyes and could see again, her father cried. So did we.
Today, 100% of Priya’s eyesight has been restored, and her future, too. She can now go to school and has a second chance at life that she never thought she’d get.
This was but one of many miracles we saw during our road trip across the world’s largest poorest country.
Starting in Calcutta, on the east coast of India, we traveled more than a thousand miles west to Mumbai, visiting eye hospitals, clubfoot clinics and burn wards.
In the eye hospitals, we saw hundreds and hundreds of blind babies, children and adults. Blindness is almost an epidemic in the developing world where it’s 500% more prevalent than in the U.S.
We met babies who were born blind, children who went blind, mothers and fathers who became blind and many blind senior citizens.
Whatever the age, in a developing country blindness is like a death sentence. They say a person who is blind is like a mouth with no hands. If you can’t work, you don’t eat.
20 million blind could have their eyesight restored – just like Priya – but they are too poor to afford it. And no one will help them.
Except we did! With your support, we helped provide surgeries that restored the eyesight of hundreds of blind children and adults that no one else would help.
In the clubfoot hospitals, we saw how one of the world’s cruelest birth defects has ruined the lives of millions of children.
If you can’t stand, walk or run, that pretty much ends any chance of going to school, getting a job, getting married, etc.
Clubfoot ends lives before they even begin. Watching a little kid struggle to walk on their deformed feet is heart-breaking.
Luckily, our partner hospitals have a miracle cure for clubfoot that can straighten even the most twisted feet in as little as six weeks! They put a series of casts on the feet and ankles that straighten them just like braces straighten teeth.
The entire treatment and small surgery at the end costs about $250. That’s all it takes to save a child who was born with club foot from a lifetime of pain and suffering.
At some of India’s largest burn centers, we the bravest patients and most heroic doctors.
We heard horrific stories of pain and suffering: oil lamps falling on sleeping children, gas cookstoves exploding, straw huts erupting in flames, little babies left home alone crawling into fires, and acid being used as a weapon.
One woman with 3rd degree burns over 90% of her body had been cooking for her family when her dress was engulfed in flames.
We stood by her bedside in silence as she pleaded with the doctor to please save her life, explaining she had two young children at home, her husband was dead and there was no one to take care of her children.
One third of the patients in these burn wards usually die.
The sad part is that they die not from their burns, but from their poverty.
They cannot afford the dressings, the treatment, the surgery that will save their life.
The “lucky” ones who live are often not very lucky at all.
Usually they are sent back out into the world without receiving the proper care and essential surgery they need.
Crippled and often horribly disfigured, they face very long and difficult lives with little hope of ever getting the surgery they need.
The selfless surgeons and heroic nurses we met are a real inspiration.
Under very difficult circumstances and in the poorest areas of the poorest countries in the world, they are saving children no one else will help.
At every hospital, ward and clinic we visited, we would go bed to bed meeting patients and their parents. They came in all shapes and sizes, with different stories and backgrounds and their ages varied from 5 weeks to 96 years old.
But they all had 2 things in common.
The first was extreme poverty. These parents were day laborers, rickshaw pullers, farmers, basket weavers, seamstresses, fruit sellers, ditch diggers, etc. who made a dollar or two a day.
You could see it in their rough hands, their tattered clothing, the deep lines on their faces.
These are the poorest people in one of the world’s poorest countries. In a million years, they could never afford the life-changing surgery their child needed.
The second thing they had in common was luck.
When we asked, “Why are you here today?” many of them pulled out a tiny, crumpled up newspaper ad offering free surgery. Our partners ran these ads to bring in lots of patients for our visits – and they worked. Many came from hundreds of kilometers away which shows you how desperate they are.
Many of them saw an ad after waiting for many years, just like Priya and her dad did. But if we never took that trip, none of those ads would have run, and none of those children and adults would have been helped.
They’d still be waiting.
Priya and hundreds of others would still be blind, crippled and disfigured.
Of course, my immediate reaction is that we have to go on more trips. But actually, they can run the ads without us visiting.
What our partners really need is our financial support so that they can take care of the hundreds who will respond to the ads and show up at their hospitals begging for help.
Now that we’re back in New York, every day we get an email, a call or a letter from our partners asking us…
“Can we run some more ads?”
“Can you send us another grant?”
“How many more can we help?”
Tough questions that we are answering the best we can.
