Tag term summary

• President Jose Ramos-Horta and Gabi Hollows open Timor-Leste’s first National Eye Centre

  Timor-Leste President, Jose Ramos-Horta, joined Gabi Hollows to officially open the National Eye Centre in Dili.  The Centre will provide sight restoring surgery to thousands of people suffering from avoidable blindness and is the first of its kind in Timor-Leste. “I hope that working together, in the next few years to come, the backlog of cataracts is eliminated,” President Ramos-Horta said.

• Timor Leste

  Since 2005, The Foundation's sister organisation, The Fred Hollows Foundation New Zealand, has worked in close partnership has worked closely with the government of Timor-Leste to provide vital eye health services for the nation’s one million inhabitants and to develop and implement a national eye health strategy.

• Avoidable Blindness Initiative restoring sight in Timor-Leste

  Seventy-four-year old Timorese grandmother, Olinda Guterres, can see again thanks to work undertaken as part of the Australian Government’s Avoidable Blindness Initiative, and implemented by The Fred Hollows Foundation New Zealand. Mrs Guterres was the first of around 1,000 Timorese who will receive cataract surgery over the next 12 months – undergoing the procedure in a specially equipped shipping container that has been set up as a short term operating theatre.