Published: September 20, 2008 10:01 pm         

Preventing blindness in India

A Stillwater native traveled to India in July to work with a group that tries to improve eye health and eliminate preventable blindness.

Evan Schwenk, a premedical senior at Oklahoma State University, volunteered with Unite For Sight to travel to Bihar, India. He is studying biochemistry at OSU and said he plans to build upon his experience with Unite for Sight when he enters medical school.

“The chance to get to travel to India and have a hands-on, effective experience increased my desire to help people through medicine around the world,” he said.

He took with him more than 300 pairs of eyeglasses, which he collected from the Stillwater community and OSU campus, to distribute to people who needed them in Bihar.

Unite For Sight (www.uniteforsight.org) is a nonprofit organization that empowers communities worldwide to improve eye health and eliminate preventable blindness. While volunteering with Unite For Sight, Schwenk worked with a Unite For Sight partner eye clinic to provide eye care in communities without previous access.

On a year-round basis, the clinic’s eye doctors diagnose and treat eye diseases in the field, and surgical patients are brought to the eye clinic for surgery.

Unite For Sight sponsors all of the eye care programs, including providing patients with free surgery so that no patient remains blind because of lack of funds. In 2006 and 2007, Unite For Sight provided eye care to more than 200,000 people and sponsored more than 10,000 sight-restoring surgeries.

Schwenk participated in hands-on clinical service while assisting eye doctors in rural villages. He assisted ophthalmic nurses and optometrists in all aspects of the eye care programs, including taking patient history, testing visual acuity, assisting the eye nurse with the examination, distributing medication and eyeglasses prescribed by the eye nurse, providing eye health education in the villages and schools and helping with the coordination of patient surgeries.

He also raised money for Unite For Sight; 100 percent of the funds raised provided sight-restoring surgeries for patients living in extreme poverty.

He is working with Alpha Epsilon Delta to bring a local Unite For Sight chapter to OSU and Stillwater.

     

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