Once upon a time

Fondateur Voir La Vie

It all started by pure chance (as always), with the complicity of Father Georges RUFFIO. While Paul GIL and Nicolas GERAKIS were responsible for the Emmaüs Community of Pointe-Rouge (Marseille), Georges officiated in Guinea as an instructor father. In one of his letters, he alerted them to a case of cataracts in an 8-year-old girl. Septic, he was asked to revise his diagnosis, thinking that this type of pathology only applied to elderly people.

Betty did suffer from bilateral congenital cataracts. Complete blindness awaited him shortly without inevitable surgery. We were in 1993. A first mission detected many other cases of children also affected by the disease. The idea of operating on them all in Marseille was quickly replaced by that of set up an ophthalmological operating structure in the country.

For ten years, Betty and 50 other children were welcomed to France for operations particularly difficult to carry out on site. During this time, we searched for, located, annexed, equipped and trained the very first Guinean ophthalmological unit capable of performing extra-capsular lens extraction operations. Ten more were created subsequently.

30 years later, the motivation is the same. Paul, founding president, has left us. The administrators have succeeded one another, Guinea welcomed Benin and Senegal, other countries where our programs operate. There are now dozens of trained local doctors and isolated populations are visited by our mobile units.
We have developed optics, favored prevention, targeted children to prevent them from dropping out of school due to vision problems. We have agreed all our units with the public health programs of all the countries in which we operate. We have formed partnerships with local NGOs for ever greater efficiency.

Voir La Vie offers beneficiaries of its humanitarian programs the opportunity toopen your eyes to life again. This implies a permanent dynamism to structure, organize and act with those who motivate us and give us, in return, all the hope they carry in us.

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