Glasses Needed In Quetta Hospital

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30413, 11 April 1964, Page 20

Glasses Needed In Quetta Hospital

The mission hospital in Quetta, ' West Pakistan, headed by Mr R. W. B. Holland, a surgeon who specialises in eye diseases, should be handing out thousands of pairs of spectacles from Christchurch in the year ahead. Milkmen will collect the spectacles—even frames without lenses and cases without glasses will be welcomed—-on behalf of the Christchurch Lions Club,, which will arrange to send the spectacles to Mr Holland.

A vice-president of the Lions Club, Dr. W. R. Holmes, himself an eye specialist, said yesterday that if the club received the 50,000 spectacles it hoped for, the hospital could be kept in supplies for some years. The club has already helped the mission, which was started more than 40 years ago by Mr Holland’s father, who was knighted for his work, by sending two crates of surgical instruments and equipment—about 250 pieces. “Yes, even the frames without the lenses is worth its weight in gold,” Mr Holland said on a tape recording sent to New Zealand. “The cost of a frame here is exorbitant.”

Gifts of glasses would be particularly valued by the hospital and by their recipients, he said. Cases would

be useful, for many of the tribesmen who were given glasses without cases carried them in their turbans or on a piece of string in their voluminous clothes. “Then they sit on them, and something valuable has gone.” Just how valuable those spectacles could be was illustrated by Dr. Holmes when he said the ability to read and see could mean the difference between a job and starvation existence for a breadwinner’s family. While the hospital provides general medical services, the proportion of eye work is much greater than in Western countries—perhaps as much as one-third. Showing the amount of work done, a recent letter to Dr. Holmes mentioned that in an eye clinic in Shikarpur there had been 1606 cataract operations. Milk vendors will leave all their customers a bag in which disused spectacles, frames and cases can be put. The milkmen will collect them and they will be sorted before being packed for overseas.

The photograph shows a Baluchi tribesman typical of the men given eye treatment when the hospital sends a “camp” up to the hills once or twice a year and performs operaitons almost on a chainsystem.