Almost two decades ago, I reported on Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian quests to combat trachoma, a blinding disease that often torments women in rural Africa. Repeated bacterial infections lead to scarring of the eyelids, eventually turning the eyelashes inward. Each blink causes the lashes to scratch victims’ eyeballs like thorns, damaging their corneas.
At the time, I was on the global health beat, working on a series about efforts to defeat trachoma and other diseases that persist in developing countries, and set out for a free surgery camp in the Amhara region of Ethiopia that was supported by The Carter Center. People flocked there for the simple, 15-minute operation that would lift their lashes off their eyes.
I was struck then, and again now at his death, by how Mr. Carter’s determination to take on a disease eradicated long ago in the United States changed the lives of two people afflicted by it: Mare Alehegn, and her daughter, Enatnesh. I met them in a shady spot where I was speaking with patients who had walked long distances for an operation to relieve their pain, their dusty cheeks etched with the salty tracks of their tears.
Enatnesh, a slip of a girl of 16 who looked 10, shielded her barefoot mother from the harsh sun beneath a faded black umbrella. Enatnesh’s father had divorced her mother when the girl was just 6, after the disease rendered Mrs. Alehegn unable to perform the jobs of a wife, including carrying water from distant wells, working in the fields and cooking over smoky dung fires. Her husband, I learned, also had trachoma — and believed that staying together would be a death sentence for them both.
Enatnesh had been given a choice: become her mother’s caretaker, or go with her father, who would remarry a healthy young woman and rebuild. She chose her mother, and dire poverty.
I watched that day as a health worker operated on Mrs. Alehegn’s eyes, restoring her hope that she could weave more cloth, earn more money and free her daughter — still only a 5th grader halfway through her teens — to go to school full time and pursue her dream of becoming a doctor.
Mr. Carter grew up in rural Georgia during the Depression. He wasn’t squeamish about a disease spread by flies that land on human feces where people relieve themselves outside, then cluster around the eyes.
In a video interview, he set out two simple solutions: building outhouses and teaching children to wash their faces. “This is what we did in the Deep South when I was a child,” he explained. “We got rid of the flies and now we don’t have any more trachoma.”
The preventative and surgical interventions have been enormously effective. In the nearly two decades since my visit, the Carter Center has provided financial support that enabled Ethiopia’s health ministry to perform the eyelid surgery on 739,000 people in the Amhara region alone, more than half the surgeries needed in the entire country. Millions more no longer require antibiotic treatment to fend off the repeated infections that lead to blindness.
I’ve thought often of Mrs. Alehegn and Enatnesh, and how I would love to go back and find them again. How have their lives changed in the years since we met? Mr. Carter dedicated his post-presidential life to just such invisible people. And through the work of the Carter Center, he stopped the agony of eyelashes scraping across the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people like them.
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