Born blind with cataracts in both eyes, 8-year-old Morlai Bangura can now see and has started attending school in eastern Freetown, with support from the Sierra Leone Conference’s Lowell and Ruth Gess United Methodist Eye Hospital.
In a country where opportunities for the blind are limited and many are reduced to beggars, Morlai — who was living in a remote village in northern Sierra Leone — did not have the slimmest prospect of sight or city life, let alone education.
He now has all three, thanks to the United Methodist eye hospital’s outreach team who discovered him in the woods of Barmoi and brought news of his condition to hospital authorities in Freetown.
“There is no health care facility in that very remote part of the country, no school. He was blind and was working on the farm. Nobody knew his cataracts were operable,” said Dr. Moges Teshome, the ophthalmologist who performed the surgeries.
