TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Light of day: Cornea donors on the rise
More and more young people like Savina have been registering as potential cornea donors in recent years, said Eros Rosikin of Bank Mata Indonesia. Each month, the bank sees around 20 new potential donors, commonly aged between 20 and 50, Rosikin said.
Change Size
A patient has his eye checked before a cataract surgery in Gresik, East Java. (ANTARA FOTO/Zabur Karuru)
I
t was almost pitch black; nothing was in sight. Seconds later, however, colors started to become visible as 19-year-old Savina Monica slowly opened her pair of perfectly-functioning eyes.
"Ever since I was a kid, I'd tried to imagine how it felt to be blind," she told The Jakarta Post.
What Savina imagined was an everyday reality for millions of Indonesians suffering from blindness.
They included 3 percent of the country's above 50-year-old population, according to Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness (RAAB) data collected between 2014 and 2016 in 15 provinces across the country.
