Giving Back:
Making a Difference in Africa
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When Moes Nasser, OD, owner and founder of three optometric practices in the Houston area, won a mission trip to Uganda from Optometry Giving Sight, he couldn’t have known just how much it would change his life. Since that first trip, Nasser has been back three more times.
Africa has a special place in his heart as Nasser himself is from East Africa. He was born to parents of Indian descent, was raised in Tanzania, and moved to the US when he was eighteen. “Those are my roots,” says Nasser, who says he’s been involved in volunteering since he moved to the US but just hadn’t taken the opportunity to do work overseas.
“That’s why I’m so grateful to have won this trip,” says Nasser. “Not because they paid for my ticket, but because it ended up being a catalyst that got me to go there. There’s part of me that wishes I’d gone earlier in life because now I’m addicted. I am so appreciative for that contest because it has opened up a totally different dimension for me in terms of volunteering my time.”
As a young man, Nasser himself was helped by someone that inspired him to enter the field of optometry. “I became intrigued with eyecare—even at a young age,” he admits.
While Nasser had his early education in East Africa he went to college and medical school in Pakistan and then moved to Houston in 1976 to pursue education in Optometry. Today, as he travels to Africa, he remembers how much the help from one kind-hearted person changed his life—and he aims to make the same difference in the lives of others.
Amazing Opportunities
In his time spent volunteering his services in Africa, Nasser says he has witnessed a lot of life-changing moments. For instance, he’s seen first-hand how valued a pair of glasses can be to someone in need. In one case, there was a 13 year old boy that came in for an eye exam and was a student at the school for the blind. Upon examining him, Nasser discovered the child was -24.00 in the right eye and about -22.00 in the left eye—something he was able to correct to about 20/50 vision.
“When I took him to the window and showed him a soccer game being played he initially had no reaction—I think he was stunned,” recalls Nasser. “But after a few minutes he started telling his dad what he could see and I saw his father with tears in his eyes. He had been labeled blind all of his life and now he could see. It’s amazing that a young man was labeled blind just because he didn’t have a pair of glasses.”
On his most recent visit—three weeks prior to press time—Nasser had another moment that’s stuck with him. He saw a patient that came in with a red and puffy eye that he could no longer open. Upon questioning, Nasser learned that the man had gotten something in his eye almost a year prior and wasn’t able to get it out.
“I opened the eye and put a drop of anesthetic in it,” recounts Nasser. “I saw that some epithelial tissue had grown over the foreign body so I had to scrape that off to remove the foreign body. In total it probably took about three minutes. I had him sit for a while and made sure he wasn’t in pain. He said he was feeling all right so I sent him home with some antibiotic drops. A few hours later he showed up again in line. I saw him from afar and assumed he must be in pain. I sought him out and he told me he had come back to give me a gift. It was a goat. That is a huge gift for a very poor man and of course I did not accept it. This man was too poor to see an eye doctor yet he had a heart of giving. That was extremely touching to me.”
Actually, Nasser says that “poor” doesn’t even describe the individuals he was seeing. He says they’re “ultra poor.” It’s something that those living in the US may have a hard time even picturing. They live their lives wondering if they will be able to feed their child their next meal or not. They are people in extreme need and Nasser says he’s now addicted to helping as much as he can. Nasser has taken on the clinic in Bariadi as a challenge to sponsor. Between his patients, friends, family, and himself, he raises the funds to keep that clinic going. It is about 20 miles from Nyambiti, the village he was born in.
Future Plans
Nasser’s next trip is planned for March and he’ll be brining an ophthalmologist friend who will be training some surgeons in Tanzania on how to do surgery with a Phoco machine that has been shipped in advance. “This won’t be at my clinic as we’ve done some thinking and decided that the machine could be better used if it was in a major city,” says Nasser. “We want to reach as many patients as we can.” It will be housed in Dar-es-Salaam, the capital.
In raising future funds, and encouraging others to do the same, Nasser says that giving back is very simple. When patients check in at any one of his three offices they receive a little slip that asks if they’d like to donate to the charity. They can do $1, $2 or $5. “My smallest office collected about $200 last month and on average my other two offices collect about $400 or $500 each month,” says Nasser. “At roughly $1,000 a month, we’re raising $12,000 a year. Then I pay for my travel costs and time. It’s simple to implement a program like this and help raise money for Optometry Giving Sight, which is truly a wonderful organization. Just $5 pays for a refraction and gets the patient glasses. If you collect $200, you’ve just helped 40 human beings get an eye exam and glasses.”
Currently Nasser runs the project “Texas to Tanzania” to continue raising funds for the clinic. He says many patients give a few dollars and since his practices see about 1,200 patients a month, this has the potential to really add up. He even had one patient give $5,000.
“I would encourage every eye doctor to consider something like this,” Nasser urges. “Just by raising money you’re doing so much to help people that are truly in need.”
For more information on Optometry Giving Sight, visit http://www.givingsight.org
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