I’ve been doing lots of assessments during my time in Juba. My hope is to discover the needs of the communities I visit and look for ways that Samaritan’s Purse may be able to help. I recently visited a place called Luri Rokwe, which is home to one of the world’s few remaining leper colonies.

  Photos from Lori's visit to Luri Rokwe.People of several tribes moved here back in the ‘70s, seeking medical treatment. Juba was the only place in South Sudan that had a clinic to treat leprosy. Many of them stayed and, as the years have gone by, started families and had children.

A man in the village told me that many people suffer from blindness. I looked around and saw some who were blind and others who had difficulty seeing. I wondered if leprosy really led to blindness, or did these people suffer from cataracts or some other operable eye condition?

I have a friend with Christian Blind Mission who is an ophthalmologist in Juba. I called her about what I had seen, and she said it was true that leprosy leads to blindness in some cases. I went back to the village with my interpreter, Meta, and we went from house to house meeting the people with the most severe eye issues. We told them to meet us the next day, and we’d take them to the eye doctor.

When we arrived, no one was waiting for us, which was disheartening. We talked to one of the men in the village, and he started going around to the houses again and in the end, we ended up with 14 patients who went with us to the eye clinic.

Every person was checked, and to my surprise, most of them had cataracts, which could be removed the next day.

Imagine: You’ve dealt with leprosy all your life, loss of limb, mobility, complications in even the little things like opening a bottle, and you live under the burdensome stigma society has placed on you. In old age, things become even more complicated. Your vision fails. To my amazement, many were still willing to have the surgery.

I had the privilege of seeing some of the surgeries and taking photos. When I returned to the hospital to take the patients back to their homes, I saw something that made me turn away because I couldn’t control my tears.

Zaina, one of the patients, had not seen her daughter Kakurina for three years. Before the surgery, Kakurina would guide her mother around with a stick. Now Zaina was able to see her 10-year-old daughter standing in front of her. She was beaming.

“I used to be inside and not able to go out until my daughter came to help me,” Zaina said. “And these days I’m able to see where the sun sets and where the sun rises.”

For some patients, it will take about a week before their sight returns. I’m praying that God’s hand of healing is what they see and know.