Mulu is 50 years old, she is the mother of Meseret and Ayele and is already the grandmother of Yabsera, 3 years old. She lives in Wolkite, in southern Ethiopia: the whole family grows coffee and enset, the “false bananas”. A year ago she Mulu she begins to feel sand inside her eyes and great pain, so much so that at one point she is no longer able to manage the house or work in the fields. What initially seemed like a trivial conjunctivitis is actually trachoma, an infectious disease of bacterial origin which is among the leading causes of blindness in the world. It affects 1.9 million people and is part of the Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD). “Since my husband is elderly, my son was forced to drop out of school to help me. My neighbors used to take me to the market, because I couldn’t move alone any longer », says Mulu.
One day, however, Mereset, the daughter, discovers that at the Grarbet Tehadiso Mahber hospital, 100 km from their home, there is the possibility of undergoing a free visit. The eye center is located in Butajira and is a partner of Cbm Italia Onlus. It is here that Mulu discovers that she has trachoma and that she has to undergo an operation. She has no doubts: “Thanks, I want to do it, I’m sure that any post-operative pain will never be like the one I’m forced into every day now,” she says. The surgery takes 40 minutes, and just 20 minutes after leaving the operating room that day, Mulu takes off her bandages. Just an hour to change your life. “Everyone I meet with this problem, I will certainly send them here to be treated,” says the woman. Mulu returned home after a few days, to be a mother and grandmother as before the trachoma, taking care of the whole family again.
Mulu’s story is one of many that Cbm Italia – a humanitarian organization engaged in the prevention and treatment of visual impairments in the countries of the southern hemisphere – has collected in Ethiopia. Cbm Italia works on trachoma in two countries, Ethiopia and South Sudan. It does so by following the SAFE strategy recommended by WHO since 1993: an acronym in which each letter is the initial of a word. S stands for Surgery, that is the surgery necessary to treat the advanced stage of trachoma; A stands for Antibiotics, because antibiotics are used to clear the infection; F for Facial cleanliness, i.e. facial cleansing and hygiene; And for Enrironmental improvement, i.e. improvement of the living environment, with access to water and toilets. In Ethiopia, in the Amhara Region in the north of the country and in the Region of Nations, Nationalities and Peoples, in the south, Cbm Italia is carrying out three projects involving a total of 260,000 people, who can benefit from the distribution of antibiotics, access to clean water thanks to the construction of wells and water systems, training sessions dedicated to hygiene. By 2025, over 5,600 people may also be operated on for trichiasis, i.e. the deviation of the eyelashes which is a consequence of trachoma: by rubbing against the eyeball, the eyelashes cause irreversible opacities and blindness.