2018 was the 22th year running that our Club has conducted this international project in the Philippines. We partner with the Cataract Foundation of the Philippines, the Visayas Hearing Centre and the local Rotary Clubs. Every two to three years, we move to a different province to replicate our successful model.
It is hard to describe the joy it brings when one of your ‘patients’ regains their sight, or even more significantly, when they get to see for the first time in their lives. Here we learn the true meaning of our motto, ‘Service above Self’ !
Children need to be able to hear in order to be able to learn. We work with local primary schools to screen the ears of thousands of students. It’s a bit of a challenge to learn how to use an otoscope on a child’s ear, but it doesn’t take long to learn to look for that pearly-white ear drum. We discover infections, foreign objects like insects, and impacted wax. The school nurse is trained to follow up with the medications to fix each issue so that after our visit, good hearing is sustained for the children of that school.
As our team visits different areas of the Philippines, we get to learn of other local needs. In the Province of Masbate there were health problems in the rural areas, caused by drinking water from shallow, polluted wells. In partnership with Plan International and the local Rotary Club of Masbate, we funded the construction of 150 water filters over two years. Each of these were placed next to the water wells that were shared by up to five different families. People soon discovered that if they filtered the water from the well before drinking it, the dysentery would stop and their children became more healthy. After two years, the local government took over funding this project as it is a very economical way to reduce their health budget.
The Philippines is quite regularly devastated by powerful typhoons. Through the local Rotary Clubs we have been able to assist with funding the recovery efforts for both typhoons Yolanda in 2013 and Nona in December 2015.