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Chapter 16
Why Children Lose Their
Vision and What We Can Do
When people confront health problems like blindness, they often look
for physical and medical causes. These causes are important, and you
can learn about them in this chapter. However, to prevent blindness
in a community, we also have to look at the social causes of blindness.
For example, poor children are more likely to have eye infections and
difficulty seeing than other children. Why?
The Story of Penda and Kesi
Penda lives in a small village in Africa. Several years ago, her
husband died in a bus accident, leaving her with 3 young children.
A few months later, she had another baby, a girl named Kesi. To
feed her 4 children, Penda had to work long hours, so she stopped
breastfeeding early.
When Kesi was 1 year old, her left eye got swollen. Penda treated
her daughter’s eye with herb compresses, but Kesi’s eye did not get
better. A few days later, a thick liquid started coming out of Kesi’s
eye. Penda was very worried. She had no money for a doctor, so a
friend took Penda and Kesi to see a health worker in another village.
The health worker told Penda that her daughter was not getting
enough of the right foods, so her eyes were losing their sight. To have
healthy eyes, she explained, children need to eat foods like green
leafy vegetables, orange vegetables and orange fruits that have
vitamin A, which keeps eyes healthy. The health worker treated Kesi
with vitamin A capsules. It was too late to save the sight in Kesi’s left
eye, but the treatment was early enough to save the sight in Kesi’s
right eye.
Penda was thankful that some of her daughter’s sight had been
saved. Now, she wants to teach other mothers about how important
vitamin A is for children’s eyes. She and the health worker are
planning a meeting for pregnant women and mothers of young
children. Penda is hopeful that other mothers in her village can find
low-cost ways to eat better and improve health for themselves and
their children.