GiftsBy Jen Richman
The IndUS Business Journal, December 15, 2008
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Ravishankar organized two rural eye care camps
CAREY, N.C. - Sindhu Ravishankar, a 19-year-old sophomore at North Carolina State University and a Carey, N.C., resident since she was a young child, won a Global Action Award for her efforts to combat a lack of accessible eye care in her native Mysore, India, and reaffirmed her future career plans in the process.
Ravishankar's goal of helping residents of rural southern Indian towns developed in stages, first by way of collecting used glasses, culminating in a pair of day-long, eye care camps in July 2007, one in Gundulpet and the other in Therekanambi.
According to Ravishankar, she was inspired to help during a previous visit to Mysore with her family that revealed poor hygiene and families living in close quarters.
She found that poor vision had caused some in the community to lose their jobs, limiting their ability to provide for their families or provide the most basic of necessities for themselves. Ravishankar said her awareness of the problem deepened upon meeting local schoolchildren "who just wanted to see the board."
While the visit to India piqued Ravishankar's desire to help, a conversation with a visiting uncle provided the framework for her to be able to see her plans through.
Her uncle, who resides in India, is a member of the Lions Club, which provides service work internationally and is known for its work to end preventable forms of blindness through the use of eye care camps. The aspiring doctor, who is not yet wed to a single discipline, began by holding eyeglass drives at her college. Ravishankar also staged a flute concert, called "Flutey Tooty Tunes," to raise money for the camps. Her fundraising efforts totaled just over $1,700. The money served to bankroll the two eye care camps, modeled after ones run by the Lions Club.
"The eye camp was such a success and we were able to help so many more than I expected," she said.
After school-aged kids, Ravishankar said that the elderly were the next largest population receiving the camps' care. Money presented such a hurdle for the majority of this older crowd that when Ravishakar asked from which town people had travelled to get care, one woman answered not with a specific location, but in terms of how many rupees the trip had cost her.
The camps were able to service nearly 950 patients; care ranged from screenings to free eyeglasses to more than 200 cataract diagnoses.
For those who required surgery, buses waited at the rear of the camp to transport patients to Aravind Hospital, a five-hour drive.
Ravishankar said that since most patients believed their care needs could be satisfied with a pair of glasses, some grew anxious at finding their condition required a hospital visit.
Ravishankar and volunteers accompanied the patients to the hospital and explained what the surgery entailed, as well as the benefits of the procedure.
She chose site locations for the camps because of their proximity to Mysore, where residents speak Kannada, a language she speaks fluently.
Ravishankar's priority was to blend into the community while working with some of the camps' youngest recipients, which she says put the kids' parents at ease. "I didn't want parents to feel like I was an outsider. I wanted to speak and communicate with them," she said.
The Lions Club not only helped to plant the seed for the eye camp model, but also stepped in with numerous volunteers. A pair of medical students from Aravind Hospital, part of the Aravind Eye Care system, a multi-faceted blindness prevention initiative with locations throughout India, also volunteered. The students served as nurses, doing minor procedures such as screenings and eye pressure (glaucoma) tests.
For her efforts, Mercy Corps gave Ravishankar a 2008 Global Action Award and $5,000. She said she plans to use the money to draw awareness to public-health issues in India through publicizing eye-care needs in India.
The involvement with the eye care camps has served to whet Ravishankar's appetite to continue building bridges between health-care availability and rural India. "I plan to do a dental camp and a polio vaccination camp by 2010," she said.
"With these projects I want to go into global health care. I feel that right now the world is getting smaller and smaller … by helping the global community, we're helping our own local community," said Ravishankar.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the IndUS Business Journal
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