The Project Vision : ‘Let Everyone See’

Pope Francis said, ‘go to the outskirts where there the blind are waiting for sight’. This po-werful and prophetic voice has not gone in vain. Project Vision was born as a response to this call, when in 2013 Claretians of Bangalore under the leadership of Fr George Kannanthanam initiated a movement for eye donation called Project Vision.

The largest eye donation campaign in the world is planned in connection with the World Sight Day on October 13 through a very innovative program called ‘ World Blind Walk’ organised in 55 locations across five countries by a Bangalore based non government initiative called Project Vision. About 5000 visually challenged people will lead over 25,000 people in a blind folded Walk that will end with a pledge to donate eyes and help the cause of the visually chal-lenged people across the World.

 

The Project Vision was started in response to a great human suffering. The statistics regarding the number of persons who are visually challenged are very touching for anyone who is socially con-cerned - 39 million completely blind among the 263 million who are visually impaired globally. For anyone from India, there is an additional shocking information - one third of the worlds visually challenged people live in India (15 million). That figure works out to be roughly a little more than one percent of the population.

 

Project Vision was founded by George Kannanthanam, Catholic priest and social worker, who lived for 12 years with persons who had lost their sight completely due to leprosy, HIV or born as visual-ly challenged. This experience provoked him to spend the rest of his life for the cause of the visual-ly challenged people and thus was born The Project Vision (TPV) in 2013. WHY PROJECT VI-SION
Blindness is one of the most distressing human situation and sadly also one of the disabilities with more number of people involved. In many of the developing nations, blindness is about one percen-tage of the total population. India has more than one third of the worlds 39 million visually chal-lenged people, which is 15 million people.

The good thing is that about 20% of all visually challenged people could see again with a corneal transplant. This can be done only through eye donation after death. But sadly, eye donation is not a part of our social or religious custom or practice.

Despite having about 750 Eye Banks across India, eye collector has been very less. India had only 53,000 corneas being collected in 2015, where as the need for new corneal transplants in the country is about 140,000. Thus about 100,000 persons are added to the list of persons who are waiting for a transplant.

The objective of Project Vision is to bring this gap between the demand and supply of corneas.

VISION AND MISSION
THE VISION of TPV is ‘Let everyone see.’THE MISSION is providing opportunity for every blind person to gain sight and providing opportunity for the permanently blind to live a full life. Various activities taken up by TPV are running a world wide campaignto promote donation of eyes, leading to a total eye donation status globally and creating a system and infrastructure for donation of eyes. The second part of our work is to develop facilities for persons with blindness to improve their conditions of living and access to basic needs.

This vision has emerged from the example of Jesus who worked six miracles to cure the blind persons. That shows how much he recognised their pain and suffering and also how much Jesus was keen to help them, specially by giving them sight. Jesus wanted everyone to see and thus the motto of Project Vision, ‘let everyone see’.

THE MOVEMENT MODEL
The Project Vision is conceived as a movement. The goal of giving sight to everybody in the world cannot be achieved through a centre approach. It has to be spread wide into different countries and places, being adopted as a part of the work of various social, religious, cultural, linguistic and cor-porate groups and organisations. Started in Bangalore, the movement is slowly spreading to other places through various social, religious, cultural, corporate and educational related national bodies and organisations. It is a floated as a global movement since most of the nations in the world have a shortage of corneal donations.

TPV groups have been initiated in different places including in US and Canada. It has been regis-tered as a non profit organisation in the US in the name of TPV Global.US. Links have been created in the United Nations and UNICEF with a view to develop this as a global movement.

VISION AMBASSADORS
For eye donation to be successful as a national movement, we need Vision Ambassadors. Despite the large number of eye Banks and lot of money spent on awareness, eye donations are not happen-ing enough. This because we don't have a system of linking the bereaved family and the eye bank. Project Vision has developed an idea to solve this problem called Vision Ambassadors.

Vision Ambassadors are committed persons who know the facts and process of eye donation from the community. They will do the coordination between the bereaved family and the eye bank in the event of death. If there is one Vision Ambassador in every residential lay out, association, institu-tion or organisation, eye donation will be a great success. They will also create awareness in the community. About 2000 people have joined as Vision Ambassadors with TPV and we are already seeing the result.

Church has the best groups of Vision Ambassadors, beginning with the Parish priests, who could do the inspiring role to suggest eye donation in the moment of death. The first call informing about death gone to the parish priest. Secondly the various pious organisations in the Church like Vincent De Paul Society, Jesus Youth, and so on are best suited to work as Vision Ambassadors since they are in the community and their common agenda of work includes as acts of mercy.

OUR ACHIEVEMENTS
About 60 persons have regained their sight through corneal collections coordinated by Project Vi-sion members. More than 30,000 people have pledged to donate their eyes after death due to our efforts. We have about 2000 persons who have promised to promote this program as Vision Am-bassadors.

On 15th of September in the Pastoral Conference of the North Eastern States consisting of 15 Bi-shops and Majors Superiors, it was decided to take up eye donation as a part of the ministry of the Church. It was also decided that a program to bring the awareness to our community will be taken up and also create an easy system for donation involving the lay organisations.

On 16th of September, the biannual General body meeting of Catholic Health Association of India made a resolution to take up eye donation as a part CHAI’s program through its institutions. Fr George presented a plan of action as to how our hospitals could be involved in the process of eye donations.

About six parishes in Bangalore Archdiocese have already become fully eye pledged parishes. Res-ponding to an appeal and awareness program by Project vision, the entire parish community in six parishes have pledged to donate their eyes after death.

Project Vision also has been able to work to make the process of eye donation easy by creating sys-tems that are easily accessible and effective. It is working towards creating a national common phone number for eye donations. A common number of eye donation is already created in Karnata-ka and Tamil Nadu which is 104.

Apart from the promotion of eye donation, direct services for the visually challenged are also taken up. 4000 cataract operations have been organised freely in the past two years. About 100 talented students are helped in their education and other rehabilitation programs. We helped about 15 fami-lies for their rebuilding of lives after floods in Chennai last year.

THE BLIND WALK
The tool to spread the message of eye donation developed by Project Vision is Blind Walk. Making sighted people to blindfold themselves and to walk about a kilometre, led by a completely blind person is a lifetime experience which leads them to a pledge to donate their eyes after death. The first three Blind Walks were conducted in Bangalore in 2014 in connection with the Indian eye do-nation fortnight. The creative and new method caught the attention of the public and the media. With a view to spread the message outside Bangalore, TPV organised Blind Walks in six places in 2015- Mysore, Tumkur, Hubli, Doddaballapur, Chennai and Bangalore. More than 500 persons participated in each Walk.

Blind Walk 2016 is going to be a global event on World Sight Day with Walks being organised in about five countries and fifty five locations - in United States, China, Nepal, Srilanka and most places of significance in India. List attached. It will happen simultaneously on the same day, thus creating an impact for eye donation across the world.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EVENT
The walk will be led by blind people - They walk with their white cane in the front leading a group of five people who will hold on to the blind person in the front. Blindfolded persons literally will have to depend on them to walk.

Blind folded walk at all Prominent Locations

Sighted people would be blind folded

1 km stretch Walk
Open to everyone
Built in Awareness Programs program at starting and ending locations
Entertainment programmes by the blind
We end with a pledge to help the visually challenged including pledge to donate the eyes.

STRONGER TOGETHER
The global theme for World Sight Day 2016 from International Association of Prevention of Blind-ness is ‘Stronger Together’. Keeping to the spirit of this theme, World Blind Walk is organised by bringing together more than 500 organisations coordinated by Project Vision. They include reli-gious, social, developmental, health, educational. linguistic and cultural entities, but all coming to-gether to promote the cause of the visually challenged people. In every location, there are about ten agencies who are partnering together, not just for participating, but for organising the event, includ-ing sharing the expenses. Thus Bling Walk is realising the goal of ‘stronger together’

There are five major partners for this Walk. They are National Federation of the Blind (NFB), Art of Living (AOL), Eye Bank Association of India (EBAI), Catholic Health Association of India (CHAI) and 104 Health Line of the Government. All their units in each place will be part of orga-nising the program, thus taking the program to a very wide audience.

Catholic Health Association is a national partner with Project Vision to organise the Blind Walk. With over 2000 heath institutions spread across the country, CHAI members would be part of the Walk in many places. Jesus Youth, Vincent De Paul Society and many religious congregations are integral part of the Walk in many places.

IMPACT OF BLIND WALK
The impact will be at four levels. First it will be a great experience for the persons who are sighed to walk blindfolded. This can change their lives and become committed to this cause. Secondly it is a great feeling for the visually challenged persons to lead the sighted people, which they have never done. Thirdly a great number of person pledge their eyes and become Vision Ambassadors which will in the long run turn into actual eye donation. This also gets the regular NGOs who are working for various causes to add visual impairment as part for their work and a network is created for a combined action.

Project Vision has set its goal as bridging the gap between the demand and supply of corneas as its goal, which we hope to achieve in about five years with consistent work of promotion globally in this field.

WHAT CAN CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY DO?
Christian community would be the best group in the world for promoting eye dona-tion. Jesus has a special love for the blind persons and we see him miraculously cure six blind persons in the Bible. Building on this fact, Pope Francis has been encourag-ing every Christian to donate organs and eyes. He said,’go to the outskirts where there blind are waiting for sight’. The Catholic Bishop’s Conference of India pro-motes this as an action program for the Church in the Health Policy.

Despite such strong background, the Church has never taken up eye donation as program and never promoted it as an official activity. Thus not much of an impact has been visible from the christian community. Thus in order to create an impact there is need to make eye donation as a specific program of the Church and create systems that can support this movement.

The first stage is make an official decision at the highest forums of CBCI and CRI at the national level and then at the regional and diocesan levels as well as Chapters for the religious.The second is to create awareness, which can be done on a Sunday Mass, after the clergy have been taken on board through a session for them.

Most important is to identify a group that would work as Vision Ambassadors at the parish level. Vincent de Paul society or similar organisations are the best, since they are present in most places and their overall objective is to help help people who are suffering. They have to rush to the families when someone dies, motivate them, contact the eye bank and coordinate the formalities.

Out of the three crore Christians in India, about 200,000 persons would die every year. If we can motivate even 25% of them (50,000 people), we can generate corneas needed for the whole country (100,000), bridging the gap between the demand and supply which is about 100,000. The 3% Christian community can solve the corneal blindness of India and thus can be a great contribution to our country.

Such realities of the problem of visual impairment exist in many developing countries where the Church is present. The Indian movement model can shed a light into such possibilities and opportunities, using perhaps the same strategies and methodology. Moreover Project Vision is conceived as a global movement, staring fromIndia to spread into wherever it is required. The foundation is being laid.

You can pledge your eyes and get further information at:
www.theprojectvision.org
For information on your nearest Eye Bank nearest to your place in India visit www.ebai.com

Fr George Kannanthanam MSW, Ph D
Founder Director
director@theprojectvision.org
facebook/theprojectvision

World Blind Walk

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