60% of the blind people in the world are in India and 60% of those people are blind because of cataracs. Which, ofcourse is usually possible to correct or atleast, restore sight with an insertable (intra ocular)lense plus eye glasses. When I first came to India I supported childrens` causes, but I soon realised that by and large parents do support their children as best they can, especially boy children, and where there was a need for outside support (like bonded labourers), there are many many NGO`s in India helping with children. On the other hand people who were actually blind, because of catarac, were uneducated, poor or destitute, in many cases ignorant of what was wrong with them and sadly ignorant that there is an easy cheap cure. But for some even "cheap" is too much expenditure. More important, blind people often have a whole family depending on them and when they were unable to carry on it was dragging the whole family down. In other words, when you restore a member of a poor family you restore everybody! I thought I can do much more good by restoring eye sight! It only takes a few dollars (like ten)for a catarac operation!
I have been donating money to conduct eye camps through charitable eye hospitals since many years. Unfortunately my yearly accounts of these camps got wiped off the internet when my website host callapsed but I still have all the photos which I share with you.
