Outreach

Sight flight

Once every two months a team from the eye clinic is flown by helicopter to rural areas to reach patients that cannot access the eye clinic themselves. During these visits we provide people with reading glasses and screen them for cataract. Those people diagnosed with cataract are brought to the eye clinic for surgery.

This helicopter service is sponsored by the South African organisation Mercy Air and Hope & Healing Canada.

Doctors for life

Our team volunteers on outreach with our partner DFL. Once a year we travel to Inhambane in Mozambique to do a week of cataract surgery. With DFL we have also traveled to the Zambezia Province.

Ebenezer

The clinic was established around 1910 by missionaries of the church known as The Pilgrim Holiness church. Their vision was to serve the medical and spiritual needs of the local community. For the first time women had the opportunity to give birth in a medically safe environment. Children were being immunized and their growth monitored.
When the missionaries left Swaziland, the maintenance of the clinic fell into disrepair. Consequently in 1998 the ministry of health closed the clinic. The health care of the community took a step backwards and women went back to giving birth at home.

Vuyiswa Precious Mazibuko, who grew up in the area and knew the clinic well, was saddened by the poor state of the building. She decided to use all her retirement savings to bring life back into the clinic. Supported by her family and church she registered the clinic, hired nurses and applied for government funding. In June 2013 the clinic was reopened and has since been run by two nurses, Thula and Irma. Student doctors from Good Shepherd Hospital visit the clinic during their elective to assist the nurses in their daily work.

The Good Shepherd Eye Clinic works closely together with Vuyiswa Precious Mazibuko to help Ebenezer in supplying the Maphungwane Community with the health care that it needs.