Stories from our programmes
Every story here is told with the consent of the person it is about, read back to them in their own language and approved by them before it appears. We illustrate them with drawings rather than photographs, so that nobody has to be photographed in order to be helped.
“I thought the board was meant to be blank”
Mitu sat at the front of her class for four years and copied her lessons from the girl beside her. Then a teacher she already knew held up a chart of broken rings.
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Sight restoration · Jumla District, Nepal
“I had forgotten that my grandson has a gap in his teeth”
Dhan Maya walked for two days to reach a cataract camp in the hills of Karnali Province, holding her daughter’s shoulder. She walked home on her own.
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Sight restoration · Osaka, Japan
“The first thing I saw was a door. It was the wrong one”
After twenty years without sight, a former piano teacher was fitted with a retinal implant. What she sees now is not what she remembers, and she is clear about the difference.
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Continuity · Oakland, California
“They told me to upgrade. People used to say that about my car”
Denise has seen through a SEIRAN 2 implant since 2011. In 2025 its battery began to fail, six years after the company stopped selling the device and a year after it stopped supporting it.
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Living with low vision · Iwate Prefecture, Japan
“I walk to the harbour on my own now. My wife says I go too often”
For two years after glaucoma took most of his sight, Sasaki Kenji did not leave the house without his wife. Fourteen lessons with a white cane changed that.
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Implant safety · Kisumu, Kenya
“Three people in one morning told me their eyes were writing on things”
In October 2023, a clinical officer at an aftercare clinic noticed that several of her patients were describing the same strange thing. Nineteen days later the Independent Implant Register issued a signal.