A Hope Unseen

Joyce and her grandchildren, who used to walk her back from the taxi drop-off point whenever she needed to travel anywhere. They’re pictured in the living area of the house whose construction Joyce had to oversee.

 
She ran her hand along the rough surface of the newly plastered wall, her splayed fingers searching for any inconsistencies. Using the curve of the building as her guide, she made her way around the whole building in this way. She could feel the builder’s impatient gaze on her, even though she could not see him. Despite this, she continued slowly, methodically – after all, how else was she going to know whether or not he had done a good job with the plastering of her new house?

 
Joyce’s world was dark. Her eyes had gradually deteriorated and now she occupied a place without light, where touch and sound were her only guide. Simple pleasures such as reading the bible and admiring her grandchildren were claimed by the darkness that encroached her. The darkness went everywhere with her: at work, the crockery supply steadily decreased due to her loss of sight.

 
Luckily Joyce is a stubborn woman. “I’m not going to die blind,” she told God. After having no success at a local hospital, she resolutely sought help at the Donald Fraser Hospital in Thohoyandou. She had heard that there was a team of doctors performing the cataract surgery that she so desperately needed to reclaim her sight. Although they could help Joyce, there were another 200 people who also needed help – and who had put their names on the list before her. Motivated by the steadily decreasing supply of crockery at work, and also the other more important things she could reclaim for herself, she implored the nurses to prioritise her surgery.

 
As well as being a stubborn woman, Joyce is a prayerful woman. Upon her return from the hospital, she received a call from the hospital, telling her that she could come in for surgery later that week. On 16 July 2015, Joyce was operated on by an ophthalmologist. “All I could think of during surgery was that I wasn’t going to die blind,” she says.

 
“On the taxi on the way home, I was telling others that I could see again, and that they should go for the operation”, she says. “I finally got to see the man who had always helped me on the taxi. I’d always pictured him as a skinny man, but he was a big man.”

 
There were a lot of new things for Joyce to see after regaining her sight. “When I got home, I just stood outside my house, looking at it. I had never seen it. I got to see my trip to Durban for the first time: although I had been in photos, I did not see anything.” For Joyce, regaining her sight meant liberation. Liberation from a physical reliance on others that restricted her, liberation from a world without pictures and faces.

 
*Joyce’s surgery, and the surgeries to be conducted on the 200+ others on the list, was made possible by Flying for Life, a Non-Profit Organisation that coordinates volunteer medical teams and flies them to remote places, which are typically under-resourced. Different.org is partnering with Flying for Life to fundraise for more cataract surgeries – go here if you’d like to know more.