Program areas at Sight Org
In this year's fight against blindness, our medical team performed 1,616 sight-restoring eye surgeries in Togo. These surgeries included cataract removal that had developed to the point of blindness, pterygium, strabismus, and eye tumors, and the focused demographic included adults and children from rural regions of Togo without access to eye care. Thousands in rural Togo remain blinded by preventable eye diseases, and our mission is to make this a problem of the past.
Our farming instructor trained four students this year in modern organic farming techniques and made preparations to increase the student body through the development of drip irrigation. This training teaches farmers to produce much more food and increase nutrition significantly. The root cause of most eye diseases is malnutrition. Through our agriculture training, we hope to reduce blindness and other diseases caused by malnutrition. Also, a problem we are working to solve is that many farmers struggle to sacrifice a rainy season to receive training. With the development of drip irrigation, we will begin training during the dry seasons, leaving the rainy seasons for students to focus on their farms to provide for their families.
Since our work began in 2012, eye surgeries have proven an excellent conduit for sharing the gospel. Togo and the neighboring nation, Benin, are the birthplaces of the voodoo religion. As a result of voodoo beliefs, many of our patients believe they are blind due to being cursed. But once sight is restored, that belief is shattered, and our ministry team introduces them to Jesus. Our ministry team is constantly amongst our patients, loving on and ministering to them. They share the gospel with our patients and their families during the week of surgery, followed by a week of ministry outreach within our patient villages. In 2022, we estimate the gospel had been shared with 5,817 people.