When asked the question, “Why climb the mountain?” Sir Edmund Hillary said, “Because it’s there.”
It is this approach to the world’s biggest challenges that makes the impossible possible, and the most daunting battles conquerable.
Such is the attitude New Zealander Neil Murray has when he visits Western Africa on his sight-saving missions as a medical advisor for cbm.
Neil, an ophthalmologist, was trained in New Zealand and practiced in Tauranga for most of his professional career. But he felt a calling to do more. He spent fourteen years doing short-term trips to the developing world, providing medical eye care to the less fortunate.
After his children were grown, he and his wife Tania moved to Lome, the capital of West African country Togo, where they have been based for the last two years. Their role was to provide capacity to a newly opened eye hospital; Neil provided medical expertise and Tania helped develop the administrative services.
Today, John Paul II Eye Hospital is the busiest eye hospital in Togo, being run by Neil and Tania’s successors, a local ophthalmologist and administrator. When they weren’t at the hospital, the couple provided medical and administrative expertise to projects in fourteen other West African countries.
‘The biggest challenge of working in the region is the political instability, he says, and he has seen some great projects shut their doors due to conflict. But it is the need to provide services for the ‘common-folk’ – the millions of people not involved in the fighting or the quest for control of government – that keeps cbm working in projects despite all odds, and affirms what he does.’
He sighted what he referred to as a ‘fantastic project’ in Northern Ghana that was the only orthopedic care in the entire northern part of the country; it had to close down due to tribal fighting. Despite this, aid projects often re-open their doors when fighting calms down and continue to climb the mountain.
“It is the small triumphs that often keep me going,” he said. He gave the example of a man who underwent cataract surgery who, because his sight was restored, was able to go back to farming and provide for his family. He was so grateful that he gave one of his twelve goats to the cbm medical team. “He gave us 1/12 of his wealth,” Neil said, “and it was very touching.”
When I asked him what it was that drove him to pursue work in politically unstable, resource-stricken countries to help strangers to see again, he simply said, “My faith.” As Christians, Neil Tania are following their calling to help alleviate poverty. “I had a skill to offer, and the need is great,” he said.
And the need is great indeed. The fact is, approximately 37 million people worldwide are blind, yet 80% of blindness is avoidable and/or treatable. More so, 90% of the 37 million blind live in the poorest parts of the developing world.
October 8th is World Sight Day, and here in New Zealand we often acknowledge this international day of recognition with a luncheon where attendees are blindfolded, or with photo exhibitions. These are all fantastic. But for Neil and Tania, World Sight Day means much more, because vivid in their minds are the faces of the blind in West Africa.
‘It is a time to focus on what can be done – on the treatable blindness. It is a day to focus on the issues, and current efforts to resolve them, such as Vision2020,’ he says.
Vision2020 – of which cbm is a founding member – is a global initiative to eliminate avoidable blindness. Spearheaded by the World Health Organization, the initiative helps to implement national programmes to battle blindness, to train eye care workers, to distribute medicine and to promote blindness prevention strategies, particularly among children.
The theme of this year’s World Sight Day is ‘Gender and Eye Health’. Neil commented, “The longer my wife and I are in the field, the more apparent it becomes to us that educating and empowering women and girls is a critical factor in breaking the poverty cycle. Not only is blindness and poverty a huge issue, but how we address that issue is important as well.”
So what is in store for Neil and Tania? They are currently based in Australia, where Tania has pursuing an accounting qualification so that she can be more effective in her future. They plan on continuing their work in developing countries and will do their part in the battle against avoidable blindness.
You can view personal narratives of Neil and Tania’s work in Africa here.
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