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In 2008 Sightsavers was chosen to host a once-in-a-lifetime project visit for the winners of the G-Nation Awards, a scheme that encourages young people to become active global citizens and offer time or support to charities by organising events and campaigns over the course of a year. We took a group of seven students, including Elena Stevens, to visit our projects in Malawi. Here Elena describes her experience, and the impact visiting Malawi had on her…

Having won the opportunity to visit Malawi and get involved with the work of Sightsavers through a G-Nation competition, we had an induction weekend to help us prepare for the trip and to teach us more about the sight problems that plague so many people throughout Africa. Amidst the notoriety of diseases such as HIV/AIDS, the massive issues concerning sight are often overlooked – however, not only can they be equally dangerous to the sufferer’s health, they affect quality of life on a daily basis. 

During the induction, we did a partner exercise which involved one person being blindfolded, and the other leading their partner across a fairly simple route; we realised how much time and effort even these few paces required – and this was nothing compared with the difficulty of stairs, and bumpy ground! Blindness not only renders every journey, every task more complicated, but can necessitate absolute reliance on others.

During our trip to Malawi, we saw first-hand the lengths people go to in order to remain independent, and self-sufficient – often against the odds, with so many suffering the effects of debilitating health conditions. Sight problems are prevalent across Africa due to the poor quality of drinking water, and restricted access to the necessary healthcare. And yet, we were introduced to Sightsavers beneficiaries for whom farming forms such a staple part of life that even full-blindness is not allowed to interfere. With the outreach system implemented by Sightsavers, farmers are given the tools and education with which to continue, or adapt, their existing lifestyles, so that they can look after themselves and their often-large families.

I’ve been to Africa three times, and it is the music, culture, dancing, the smiles, that stay with me. Malawi is the most breathtakingly beautiful country – more lush and green than you would ever associate with Africa and, with Lake Malawi occupying over a fifth of the country’s area, fringed with stunning, Caribbean-style sandy beaches. The people we met were quirky and imaginative: a beneficiary, Moses, who lives in a village near Blantyre told us how, having lost his sight, he was channelling all his senses into music and pursuing a record deal. Another villager had turned his modest hut into a shop stocking everything from hairbrushes to biscuits. He was now able to return his Sightsavers loan ten-fold, and was planning a second shop.

There were sadder moments. My friend Michael’s enduring memory of the trip is when he met a girl called Blessing at Montfort primary school for the partially-sighted in Blantyre. Blessing lost her sight – completely – overnight. Michael was shocked; in the Western world of medicine and doctors it is almost impossible to imagine this kind of thing happening. There was no treatment available at the time for Blessing, and she was forced to adapt to an entirely new way of life – not only to reading and writing in Braille, feeling her way instead of seeing it, but in losing an entire sense. It is different, we thought, to have been born without sight and to have structured one’s life around the other senses – but to have all the visions and colours and tones of the world suddenly and inexplicably removed… it must have felt like a bereavement of a central part of your character, the definition of who you are and how you “see” the world.

Malawi is brimming with enthusiasm, enterprise and hope. You can feel the spirit of the country when a whole village turns out to play football, and the way Malawians greet each other with the three-pronged handshake and cheerful smile is a metaphor for the welcoming nature of the nation as a whole. Malawi can be considered in terms of a mind-bogglingly sensory place, full of sounds, smells, textures and tastes… and sights, but sometimes these can be compensated for in other ways.