WE FIRST encountered eight-year-old Adama as she was rushed in through the hospital’s front doors. In a classroom accident, a sharpened pencil had been pushed deep into her left eye and the race was on to save her sight.

Moments before, in the nearby operating theatre of the Connaught Eye Hospital in the Sierra Leone capital of Freetown, surgeons had operated on Fatou Kamara, who thought she would never again see her grandchildren.

Later that day we met Marie Kanu, a young woman making soap in a shed behind the Sierra Leone Association for the Blind (SLAB) offices. Once a beggar because of blindness caused by measles, she had a job among friends and a real future.

They were three generations of women whose lives interlinked with one common thread. The expert care they all received was provided with the help of British charity Sightsavers International.

All three are now the focus of an extraordinary exhibition of photographs by Scotland on Sunday photographer Phil Wilkinson, which opens in Scotland later this week. Into The Light is Wilkinson’s chronicle of his trip to the former British colony to find out how the charity spends its donations.

Scotland on Sunday readers have contributed more than 50,000 over the past two years - enough to pay for almost 2,000 cataract operations. Sightsavers works in 30 developing countries to combat blindness and restore sight through specialist treatment. Blindness can destroy the lives of individuals and entire communities, yet in most cases it is preventable.

Sightsavers also supports people who are irreversibly blind by providing education, counselling and training, giving them a future in which hope replaces despair. Ten months on from that morning in Freetown, Adama is back at school and enjoying life once more. Thanks to prompt action by her teacher in taking her to the Connaught, the surgeons were able to save some vision and, crucially, the eyeball itself, preventing her from needing further operations.

Marie Kanu has been promoted. An intelligent and able woman, she is one of SLAB’s success stories and now teaches adult literacy classes in braille. Without SLAB’s help she might still be begging on the streets of a country still recovering from 10 years of brutal civil war.

Fatou Kamara, who had two operations to remove bilateral cataracts, is now back in her village outside Freetown. Cataract, an easily treatable condition considered routine in the West, is still a major cause of blindness in Sierra Leone. Yet just 27 will cover the cost of the operation on a child, 17 for an adult.

Dr Dennis Williams, a former ophthalmic surgeon and Sightsavers International’s Country Representative, said: “Fatou went completely blind and faced a bleak future.

“She is now treated like a queen in her village as she is the woman who went away to have her sight fixed and has now regained her position in society. She has a life again.” Wilkinson also covered Sightsavers’ efforts to rid the West African country of river blindness, a disease caused by the parasitic black fly, which thrives in Sierra Leone’s fast-flowing rivers.

The charity helps fund a network of field workers who deliver tablets to prevent the condition to remote villages for just 12p per person per day.

Wilkinson said: “It was a great privilege to find out for myself what a useful purpose the donations are being put to. I will never forget the look of sheer joy on the faces of children, mothers and grandmothers when they took the bandages off their eyes for the first time and they realised they could see again.

“I hope my pictures will help get the message across that even small donations can go a very long way in developing countries.” Visit the exhibition

Into The Light, featuring the photographs of Phil Wilkinson, right, will be on show at Ocean Terminal (second floor), Leith, Edinburgh, from next Saturday. To learn about Sight Savers or to make a donation go to http://www.sightsavers.org or call 0800 089 2020. To view the exhibition online, log on to http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/intothelight

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