Sau, a devoted teacher and mother from Samoa, suffered from avoidable blindness due to bilateral cataracts. Now, Sau can finally see her children again.
Sau, a devoted teacher and mother from Samoa, suffered from avoidable blindness due to bilateral cataracts. Now, Sau can finally see her children again.
When Sau first started losing her sight, she had to make a difficult choice: travel thousands of kilometres for surgery, or go blind.
For Sau in Samoa, there were no eye care specialists nearby. And the closest clinic was in a different country – thousands of kilometres away.
A lack of eye care specialists in Samoa means people like Sau are going blind. Even when a short operation could restore their sight.
After being a teacher for 30 years, Sau was devastated when her fading sight made it difficult to write lessons on the blackboard. She even struggled to tick the correct names off during her morning roll call.
Sau had cataracts. Her sight could have easily been restored with a 20-minute operation, but there was a major problem. At the time, Sau couldn’t go to a local eye clinic or see a specialist. There simply wasn’t access to one.
“I’d heard of some overseas surgical teams coming to Samoa to do eye surgery. I spent a long time waiting for them to come, but they never did,” Sau explains.
He began following her whenever she left their home, to make sure her eyesight didn’t put her in danger. Eventually, Sau had to start holding on to the back of his t-shirt and walk behind him. It was the only way she could get around safely.
When someone goes blind their entire life is impacted. But the real tragedy is that Sau should never have lost her sight in the first place. Like 90% of people in the Pacific who are blind, Sau’s vision loss was avoidable and treatable. But ONLY with local eye care.
In fact, when Sau needed her second cataract surgery on her other eye, Sau was able to receive treatment from Dr Lucilla, Samoa’s only local eye doctor. And this time, Sau’s experience was totally different.
She could access the care she needed, without travelling for thousands of kilometres. It also meant she could recover at home, surrounded by her family. And when Sau’s bandages came off after the surgery, she knew in an instant that her life had been transformed. She could teach independently again, without needing help from colleagues or students. She could walk around freely – without her family worrying she might come to harm.
But for Sau, the most important thing was being able to see her children clearly again. When she saw their smiling faces after the operation, her eyes filled with tears of joy.
“I said ‘look at you my darling daughter! So beautiful’,” Sau remembered.
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