Armani and Doctors Give Sight to Ikonda’s Poor through Volunteering

In Ikonda, Tanzania, there is a hospital run by the Consolata missionaries from Turin. It serves a population of 250,000 people and has 220 beds. The residents live mainly through subsistence farming and some craftsmanship, but they are as poor as one can be in Africa. Dar Es Salaam, the capital, is 950 kilometers away, and no one has enough money to pay for a trip there to see a doctor.

Medical Activities and Volunteering

Thus, it happens that a 17-year-old girl is declared crazy by the community, expelled from school, abandoned because she cannot see obstacles while walking, bumping into everything, not avoiding holes in the ground, and constantly blinking her eyes. Then, a doctor examines her eyes and detects a severe myopia, with -15 diopters, leaving her with only a sixtieth of normal vision, and prescribes a sturdy pair of glasses. An optician then makes these glasses, restoring her to life.

It is just one of the hundreds of anecdotes that Pier Giorgio Armani, the first optician with a shop in Riva in via Gazzoletti, and Adriana Bonora, a Varonese doctor at the ophthalmology clinic of the University of Verona, can recount after spending three weeks each year on their vacations since 1992 volunteering there.

Projects and Interventions

They were called from Togo, where they had begun in 1988, by Father Franco Cellana, a missionary native of Tiarno who has now moved to Kenya. In Ikonda, ophthalmologists and opticians are awaited by Aidan Mkalaua, a versatile nurse. There is a equipped outpatient clinic with a surgical microscope and laboratory equipment.

Cataracts, if left untreated or unmanaged, lead to total blindness. Dr. Bonora, the last time she was there, operated on 40 patients. They arrive completely blind for surgery, holding a long stick about two meters, and at the other end, a child, one of the many grandchildren each family has, guides them. After a few days, Giorgio Armani finishes the work with glasses, and they regain sight, not just silhouettes but enough to get by: five or six tenths.

Results and Needs

This happened to a teacher who was left alone with three children to support, unable to continue her work because she could no longer read the words on the pages of a book. The native nurse, trained over the years by Dr. Bonora, performs therapies and treats abscesses; he remains in contact throughout the year to get help with difficult cases. It is not yet time for him to perform surgeries: who knows…

Giorgio Armani has designed and built a special frame for Bantu people with wide noses and very flattened septa. Over three weeks, he constructs about a hundred pairs of glasses, using frames and lenses previously shipped from Italy. Glass lenses and cellulose acetate frames are the most durable; rusted hinges are replaced, and broken temples are swapped out.

There is a need for funds: Armani is seeking 45 million lire to establish a gynecological and ophthalmological outpatient clinic in Ujewa. Poverty is contagious, and it becomes difficult to help one person and say no to another. For Ikonda, where they will return again this September, Pier Giorgio Armani requests old glasses. Many households, at the bottom of drawers, still have quite a few, both for reading and for distance.

Rather than letting them sit unused, they could be donated—even if they have a broken lens or a single arm. In exchange, if the reward is not excessive, one might consider sharing the thanks written by nurse Mkalaua in the latest letter: «For all these kindnesses, we cannot tell you anything but Asante Sana», which means “Thank you very much.”

He also adds: «a child cannot pay for his mother’s milk».