Scottish Christian.com

Home > News > Scottish Christian News Monitor

Back to Ethiopia with gift of sight

An Ethiopian living in Greenock returned to his homeland to bring back sight to almost 200 blind people.

The mission was organised by Ergate Ayana, who has lived in Inverclyde for 27 years and is a retired Inverclyde Royal Hospital theatre charge nurse.

He and a team of four doctors and three nurses from Scotland went on a 10-day visit to Nekemete, a city of around 200,000 people in the western part of Ethiopia, where doctors don’t have the experience to do such operations themselves.

A total of 171 blind people were treated by the team, led by Dr Harry Bennett of Edinburgh and Dr John Murdoch of Glasgow. They were accompanied by Dr Menbere Alemu, a local eye doctor who co-ordinated the mission from Ethiopia.

Ergate said: “I have links with the Ethiopian Christian Fellowship charity and they asked me if I could get help for people with eye problems.

“People in Britain tend to get cataract problems around the age of 65, but in the Third World it happens 20 years earlier because of heat, polluted water and poor hygiene."

Full story at Greenock Telegraph.