Education

In June of 2021, SEE supported a Level 2 Manual Small Incision Cataract Surgery (MSICS) Training Course in Accra, Ghana that lasted the whole month! The physician being trained, Dr. Egbula Eni, traveled from Nigeria to improve his surgical skills and learn the MSICS technique from SEE’s partner, Dr. Thomas Baah. Dr. Eni spent the month learning and practicing, over which time he helped perform 102 sight-restoring surgeries. At the end of his training, Dr. Eni was gracious enough to share with us some of his thoughts on the entire process, including his evaluation of our organization. He had this to say: “I would encourage other ophthalmologists to partner with SEE International, as SEE is an organization that will contribute immensely [to] the fight against preventable blindness in Nigeria, in Africa, and the world at large.”

Bogota, Colombia is a capital city filled with commerce and tourism. But, just outside the city center exists a noticeable contrast in housing and economic development where the poorest families reside. Many of the city’s poorest families live on the outskirts in the mountains, and they have very difficult commutes into the city center for work. Without daycare, many of the young parents would not be able to earn an income to support their families. Fe y Alegria, a Jesuit network of organizations helping the disadvantaged and poor since 1955, has preschools within this community offering free services to children up to 5 years of age. These services include: monitoring and evaluating the child’s development, nutritional supplementation and home interventions when needed. The administrator of the preschool feeds the children three nutritious meals per day. Although it doesn’t sound like a huge accomplishment, she does this on just $1 (one…

On 16 September 2020, a student stands in an empty classroom in Panama City, Panama. A generation of children in Latin America and the Caribbean are missing out on schooling because of COVID-19. Due to the pandemic, 97 per cent of the region’s students have been deprived of their normal schooling. More than seven months into the pandemic, COVID-19 is putting education on hold for more than 137 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is according to a new UNICEF report about the devastating impacts of COVID-19 on education. Since the start of the pandemic, children in Latin American and the Caribbean have already lost on average four times more days of schooling (174) compared to the rest of the world. In a region with over 11 million cases of COVID-19 to date, most students are now at risk of missing out on an entire school year. While schools are gradually reopening in several parts of the world, the vast majority of classrooms are still closed across the region. Almost half of all countries in Latin…

Rwanda faces dire challenges when it comes to the number and skill of its health care professionals: Only two reconstructive plastic surgeons and 18 anesthesiologists serve the country of nearly 12 million people. And the need extends far beyond cleft conditions. In Rwanda, much of the surgical demand results from trauma and burn wounds. The lack of adequately trained surgeons forces some patients to wait for years before they’re able to receive treatment, which worsens their conditions and further burdens the health system. However, Operation Smile is helping to alleviate this needless suffering by empowering local health care workers with training and education. Starting in 2015, Operation Smile has partnered with the University of Rwanda, Partners In Health and the Rwandan Ministry of Health to host twice-annual surgical training rotations. Now the organization’s primary focus in the country, the rotations became formalized after a series of international medical missions conducted…

You may have heard about Loay Elbasyouni, one of the engineers behind the historic first helicopter flight on Mars. He’s also a Palestine refugee and a graduate of UNRWA schools. As a child in the Gaza Strip, Loay Elbasyouni was always tinkering around with whatever he could get his hands on. A curious and clever child, raised in Beit Hanoun, Loay would use pots and pans from his mother’s kitchen to build antennae so he could watch TV shows from as far away as Turkey. If anything was broken, Loay would fix it. When speaking to him, he quickly rattled off a list of household electronics he fixed in his childhood: his family’s TV, the toilet, the water pump, his uncle’s radio…the list goes on. When he wasn’t tinkering, Loay could be found engaging the artistic side of his brain by painting, sculpting, taking photos, gardening, or writing poetry. In…

Michel became a mom in June 2021, when baby Nathan was born; she’s part of the Wayuu community. She lives with her dad, brother and another child that a friend asked her to care for two years ago. She’s a medical laboratory technician and holds a B.A. in Administration. Although she currently works as a Procurement Analyst, she doesn’t make enough to pay for basic needs. Michel has participated in different IRC-supported programs in the community center that is located a couple blocks away from her house. She first visited to get attention after experiencing pain while breast feeding, that’s how she joined the breast-feeding orientation program, in which she has now started to participate to share with other moms-to-be her experience. Additionally, she has joined the Wapushii program after Nathan was born, where she learns how to promote his development during the Early Childhood stage; she also has accessed…