Seeing the World - Illinois College of Optometry

n
ikki Rai, OD ’03, remembers sitting
in class at ICO, listening to a lecture
about retinoblastoma and seeing
pictures of how it could devastate
a child’s vision and, in some cases,
end up taking their lives. Just a
few years later – with 8,545 miles separating her from the
comforts of ICO – Dr. Rai witnessed the ramifications of
that same disease for herself multiple times when she left
the United States to work in Bangalore, India.
For two years, she built and then managed the “Nanna
Kannu” program, which in the local Kannada language
means “my eye,” a joint initiative of Sightsavers International,
Sankara Eye Hospital, the government of Karnataka
(the state where Bangalore is located) and the National
Association for the Blind. The Nanna Kannu program’s goal
is to screen more than 150,000 children in Bangalore and
surrounding areas for vision problems, then get them free
treatment, whether through glasses, medicine or surgery.
Under Dr. Rai’s leadership, the program grew and thrived,
moving closer to its goal of eradicating preventable blindness
in children from birth to 18.
“Probably the most amazing fact is that through our
program, 44 children are receiving treatment for retinoblastoma
via either chemotherapy or enucleation of the eye,”
Dr. Rai says. “So we not only have helped save vision, but
also saved the lives of these children.”
After graduating from ICO, Dr. Rai, a native of Toronto,
worked in Binghamton, N.Y., and Detroit before landing
in New York City. It was there she began to really focus on
treating the underserved population. As part of her work
with Helen Keller International, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to preventing blindness and reducing malnutrition
in school children, Dr. Rai would go to schools in impoverished
neighborhoods to provide eye care for students.
She also worked for a hospital that had a mobile unit to
bring eye and health care to immigrants’ homes, community
shelters and other areas with underserved patients.
In 2008, Dr. Rai’s husband wanted to go to India to explore
a business opportunity, so she began exploring what she
could do there. She had done some fundraising already for
the Sankara Eye Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization
that has a goal to make India 20/20 by 2020. The Sankara
Eye Institutions are set up so that fees charged to 20
percent of the patients support the 80 percent of patients
brought in by outreach camps in rural areas.
Dr. Rai had helped raise money for the Sankara hospital in
Bangalore, so she used that connection to ensure she could
continue practicing once they moved.
“We packed up and moved our stuff to Toronto, stored
it in my mom’s basement, and went to India,” she says.
“First, I volunteered at the hospital, teaching them how to
do a good case history, recording methods, what a good
binocular vision workup is and how to present options to
patients. They don’t have that concept there. These things
are so simple that we know them like the back of our hand,
but unfortunately some of these things are foreign concepts
to them.”
For example, Dr. Rai had to teach the staff to ask some family
members to wait outside while she or another optometrist
was performing an eye exam. In India, it is common
for parents, grandparents and siblings to all accompany a
child into the exam room.
“So we not only have
helped save vision, but
also saved the lives of
these children.”
“Truthfully, they don’t want the child to have glasses, so if
they were in the room, they would coach the child about
the letters,” she says. “I had to teach the staff to be strong
with parents and ensure them that it is in the best interest
of their child that all but one family member wait outside.”
Working in the trenches
Once she obtained a work visa, Dr. Rai went to work on
the Nanna Kannu project. She was chosen because of her
experience at Helen Keller. However, even that could not
fully prepare her for the challenges she would encounter
working in extremely crowded schools and impoverished
areas where sometimes there were no bathrooms or basic
necessities such as fresh water.
Summer 2011 / ICO MATTERS / 11