For the past four years, Health Sciences instructors Kerry Chancey (left) and Carol Thomas have worked with the Baylor Children’s Medical Center in Kampala, Uganda, especially with women and children with AIDS.
Their latest project is to open a Unite for Sight project as part of their mission to bring better health care to the Ugandan people, especially in the outlying villages around Kampala.
They are working with Ugandan ophthalmologist Cillasy Tumuesigye to get the project going in Uganada and are fund-raising to bring him to the United States to attend the American Ophthalmology Association meeting in San Francisco in August. That is the first step in the Unite for Sight process; he must meet with the United for Sight medical advisory board and upgrade his skills at the conference.
His flight alone costs $1,750. Thomas and Chancey are furiously fund-raising to raise the money. They have approached organizations such as the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation, but they are running out of time.
“While we could just give up, we thought, why not first see if we can raise the money by requesting funds from our Santa Fe family?” Chancey said. “After all, Santa Fe is made up of people with generous hearts and adventurous spirits. We know this because of the previous donations that many of you made to the children and teens at Mulago hospital.”
If just 50 people donate $20 each, that is more than half of Dr. Tumuesigye’s airline ticket.
And for such a good cause. United for Sight has provided eye care to 700,000 people worldwide and coordinated and funded more than 20,108 sight-restoring surgeries for patients living in extreme poverty in Africa and Asia.
The Unite for Sight international programs are locally led and managed by ophthalmologists at partner eye clinics. The patients go from being completely blind to having their sight entirely restored by a 15-minute operation. Eighty percent of all blindness is preventable, and 36 million people worldwide are needlessly blind.
For more information, please email Kerry Chancey or Carol Thomas.
Check out the PDF about their project below.