Cambodia, one of the least developed countries in the world, has a population of over 12 million. More than 80% of people live in rural areas and poverty is widespread. More than 144 000 Cambodians are needlessly blind because of cataracts. Khim Rath, a 33-year-old mother of three, was a business woman. She used to be the proud owner of a paddy rice field in the Kompong Chnang province of Cambodia where she lives. She worked there every day to provide for her family. At age 19 Khim Rath had started to lose her vision because of her cataract affected eyes. She had difficulty seeing at school. Each year her sight got worse, until she became totally blind during a pregnancy. At the time Khim Rath didn’t know she was blind because of treatable cataracts in her eyes. Many people in her village thought she had lost her vision because she was pregnant. Forced to live a life of dependence, Khim Rath gradually lost her confidence and sense of self worth. She could not eat, walk or carry out even the most basic tasks alone. She had to stop working in her paddy field and her husband had to care for both her and the children.
People like Khim Rath work hard to get by. Unable to work in the fields she searched for other ways of earning a living. She tried making baskets at home to sell, but it took a month to make only ten baskets and the income was not enough. Four of Khim Rath’s relatives had also had cataracts. Her brother’s sight had been restored at a nearby clinic, supported by The Fred Hollows Foundation. Determined to have her sight restored too, she mortgaged her paddy field to raise the 6000 riels to get to the eye clinic for surgery. With her sight restored, Khim Rath could earn an income again, making more baskets and cultivating other paddy fields. “The valuable thing is the eye. If we lost them we cannot do any things. Although I lost a paddy rice field, but I can buy it again when my eye still see as today,” she told us. According to Kevin Frick and Allen Foster’s report on the global cost of avoidable blindness, eye health care is an extremely cost effective health intervention.
The report predicts that if the number of blind people in the world was significantly reduced by the year 2020, a conservative estimate of the economic gain would be US$102 billion. Your bequest or personal gift to The Fred Hollows Foundation will help towards achieving this remarkable personal and economic benefit. See our advertisement on this page or visit our website on www.hollows.org to learn more.

Pic: Khim Rath after her successful cataract operation transplanting rice in a paddy field in Kompong Chhnang province (Cambodia). Photo courtesy Sith Sam Ath