20/20/20

 
 
Our program name, 20/20/20, stands for 20/20 vision for 20 million blind children and adults. 
 
 
Believe it or not, that’s how many children and adults could have their eyesight restored in as little as 5 minutes through a miracle surgery that takes as little as 5 minutes.  (A child’ surgery costs around $300 and takes 15 minutes.)   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
So you ask, why are they still blind?
 
Why are 20 million children and adults still blind when the surgery is so cheap and simple and quick? 
 
The answer is extreme poverty.
 
 
 
 
In developing countries, a $25 surgery is too expensive for millions of people who are living on $1 a day. And a $300 surgery for a child is just out of the question. 
 
So the next question is why doesn’t some charity and or a government help solve this problem?  20 million blindness surgeries would cost between $700 – $800 million.  That’s not a lot of money in the world of global health. Heck, we spent $2.4 BILLION on ebola a couple years ago and helped less than 100 people. But for some reason, nobody cares about this problem.   Actually, some people do care about it and there are some blindness charities that help provide thousands, tens of thousands, some even hundreds of thousands of blindness surgeries every year. But no one cares about solving the entire problem and helping all 20 million blind children and adults.    Until we started 20/20/20. 
 
 
 
 
As the team that started Smile Train, a cleft charity that has raised $1+ billion, we were confident we could raise the $700 – 800 million required for 20 million blindness surgeries.  And we were also confident that we could find the partner hospitals that could provide millions of surgeries a year.   Just six years after we started, we had scaled up to 130,000 blindness surgeries a year.  95+% of the patients we helped were adults. But the children we helped mattered so much more.
 
 
Because if you restore the eyesight of a blind 65  year old, you are saving that person from 3 years of blindness. (Average life-span in India is 68 years.)
 
 
 
 
But when you restore the eyesight of a 5 year old little girl, you are saving her from 63 years of blindness.  Restoring the eyesight of one child is worth restoring the eyesight of 20 adults! One of the many challenges we faced at 20/20/20 was the fact that blindness is very rare in the United States and Europe. We rarely see people who are blind and it is extremely rare for a child to be blind.   But blindness is an epidemic in the developing world. It is 500% more prevalent in the developing world and it can strike AT ANY AGE.
 

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From babies who are born completely blind, up through every age bracket, all the way up to 80-year-olds, blindness is the biggest global health problem you have never heard of.  The amount of pain and suffering caused by blindness is staggering.   You see, in a developing country, when you go blind, your eyesight is just the first thing you lose. Some say it is like “dying with your eyes open.”

When a 35-year-old farmer goes blind, he loses his farm, all of his income and his family becomes beggars.

 

When a 25-year-old mother goes blind, she loses her marriage and her children as her husband throws her out and marries someone else. Blindness hurts women much more than it hurts men.

 

And when a child goes blind, they pretty much lose everything. The chance to go to school, to get a job, to lead any kind of a normal life.

For most children, blindness can be a death sentence. The WHO reports that 60% of children die within 1-2 years of going blind. Whether you are 8 years old or 80 years old, in most developing countries they say a blind person is like a “mouth with no hands.”   The saddest part of the problem of blindness is that most of this pain and suffering is completely unnecessary.  The simple surgery that can cure blindness is quick, extremely inexpensive and it gives patients not just eyesight back, but a 2nd chance at life. 

Over the past 20+ years that I have been traveling the world and doing charity work, I have seen a lot of amazing things. Extreme hardship and massive poverty. Incredible compassion and selflessness. Along the ways I have seen many modern-day medical miracles and life-changing surgeries. 

 

But I have never seen anything as powerful as watching a blind child open their eyes and see their mom for the first time in their lives. It is the most . amazing experience.

 

 

The bandages come off of the child’s eyes and he recoils and squints severely as the light rushes into its eyes for the first time. The child gradually adjusts to the light and opens her eyes wider and wider – stunned at seeing the world for the very first time. And then he hears his father’s voice and his head swivels directly to his father he connects the voice that he’s known all his life with a face he is seeing for the first time in his  life.

I have been privileged to see this dozens of times and every time I almost fall on the ground, my eyes tear up and I am absolutely speechless.   Blind adult patients act differently  when their bandages come off but it is also very emotional. The vast majority of adults had normal eyesight for most of their lives before losing it for a variety of reasons. 

I have watched hundreds, maybe thousands of adult patients have their bandages removed after blindness surgery, open their eyes and see again. They also squint as the light rushes into their eyes.

I think many of them too are afraid to open their eyes because of the fear that the surgery didn’t work.  But within a few seconds, their eyes are wide open, and they are seeing just fine. Some of them let out a scream. Some of them start crying with joy. Some of them put their hands together and thank the surgeon and nurses for this life-saving miracle they have just experienced. 

They too look around in amazement just like the kids and they too lock onto a loved one who brought them here to the hospital. A loved one they haven’t seen in years, sometimes decades.  A wife or husband. A son or daughter. Sometimes an entire family crowds around the patient hugging him or her, crying, shaking with happiness.   I have been involved with so many surgeries over the years. Cleft surgery.  Reconstructive plastic surgery. Hole-in-the-heart surgery. Orthonathic surgery. Water-on-the-brain surgery. Burn surgery. Club foot surgery. And blindness surgery. And just like it is with my three kids, I love all the surgeries all the same.   But I tell you, if I could only choose one surgery to work on it would be blindness.

Giving a blind child or adult their eyesight back is the greatest miracle I have ever witnessed. 

I am very proud that 20/20/20 helped restore the eyesight of more than 225,000 blind children and adults.  

 

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