Curing Blindness: How Thousands Are Getting Their Sight Back | Short Film Showcase

Good afternoon listeners. Welcome to our popular program, and now we have a special guest from Oak State Hospital.

Thank you, Mesi. My name is Shulo. I am here to tell our people we are going to have an eye camp at Hakati State Hospital. We are here to invite all the elderly people, or everybody who is at home that is not seeing, to come and see us at the eye clinic. So we are telling all of our listeners that we have got one month for you to come to the hospital for your screening to be operated during our eye camp.

If you are seeing a person around you who is not seeing, please bring them to the hospital. Bring your uncle, bring your grandmother, bring everybody to come. This is your chance to see [Music] again.

My name is Dr. Helena. I do have a big name, which is a traditional name, which is ISU. It means I am better off. I was born during the apartheid system where the education was different for the black people and white people. Where young people were demonstrating and scared to be arrested, to be put in prison, they decided to leave the country.

We left the country with three of my friends, and we managed to sneak over the border into Angola. In Angola, there were civil war bombings and killings, camps being attacked in the middle of the night. While we were sleeping, you heard bullets flying all over your head, corpses all over the place. And mind you, I was 15 years old. We crossed into Zambia. I ended up in the refugee camps where we built hospitals, we built our own schools, we built our barracks where we were going to stay, and we started going to school there.

We had mathematics, history, geography, English, and all that. It was completely eye-opening. I ended up going to university in Li, Germany, to start medicine. When independence came to Namibia, I came back home. I started my internship. I was the only ophthalmologist working for the [Music] state.

You have to know that back then, it was a belief that when you are old, you go blind, and that is God's will; nothing can be done about it. When I started the eye camp, just 82 patients came because they said if you go there, that young girl is going to destroy your eyes. But then the 82 that we operated on spread the message like wildfire. The following year, we couldn't control the crowds. They came in their thousands; everybody now wanted to be operated on. They said that independence has really come; we have doctors and now we can see.

You cannot just be in private practice making money, knowing very well there are thousands who are blind and they need help. You cannot call yourself a developed country if you have people getting blind from cataracts.

Today, no money in this world can pay for the happiness of someone who was blind and suddenly you take off that eye patch. Then they said, "Doctor, I can [Music] [Applause] see!"

If I have to tell you the story that they tell you after they regain their sight, we’ll spend the whole night here. “Doctor, now that I can see, I’m going to work hard and plow a lot of food. Doctor, now that I can see, I’m going to see my grandchildren that I haven’t seen for five, six years,” or a mother who has given birth and she never saw her baby came to see the child after cataract [Music] surgery.

All of us went through difficult times during the liberation struggle in the refugee camps, and that is also what connected us together. We must go back and help, just like we were helped. We have to have a culture of giving back to less fortunate people so that they can also be transformed, just as I was [Music] transformed. [Music] [Music]