Amal Al-Sibai Saudi Gazette JEDDAH — Ten years have passed since the establishment of Ebsar Foundation for the visually impaired under the patronage of Prince Talal Bin Abdul Aziz. Celebrating a decade of success in providing rehabilitative services to the visually impaired in the Kingdom, training them to find jobs, facilitating top-notch surgeries that reverse partial blindness, improving education for blind children, and virtually changing lives, Ebsar Foundation will be holding a ceremony on Thursday, November 7 at Hilton. Prince Talal will attend the event in show of his past and continued support for Ebsar Foundation which has achieved ten years of leadership and endless giving to improve the lives of the visually impaired. The remarkable man behind Ebsar Foundation who is the Secretary General and the driving force of the foundation, Mohammad Towfik Bellow, has an undying passion for this cause because of his personal experience with losing the precious gift of normal eyesight. "The idea of providing services for those with visual disabilities in the Kingdom was sparked when I came face to face with this problem and my vision began to deteriorate. "After working for 13 years as a flight attendant and in-flight services training instructor with Saudi Arabian Airlines, I was given early retirement in 1992 when I developed low vision due to retinitis pigmentosa,” Bellow told Saudi Gazette. “I pioneered the ‘meals for the blind' project which won Saudi Airlines the 1992 Mercury Award, the most prestigious international award for in-flight catering services. "I was keen on expanding this initial project to implement programs for the safety of the visually impaired on aircrafts. "This step eventually led me to creating a treatment and support center in Jeddah, to become a role model of vision rehabilitation services in the region, and to help others overcome the grave difficulties of loss of vision, which I too suffered from,” said Bellow. He added: "Services for the visually impaired were lacking in the Kingdom back in the year 1994 so I attended vision loss rehabilitation programs at Light House International in New York and at Blind Inc. in Minnesota. These events inspired me to conduct a media campaign about the need for such rehabilitation services in Saudi Arabia." According to a recent World Health Organization report, there are 124 million people with low vision worldwide and 15 million of them are in the Middle East. Studies estimated that in 2007, there were 474 thousand people with low vision in Saudi Arabia. Bellow reached out to the media, members of society, and royal dignitaries and he backed his campaign with solid facts and extensive research. He conducted studies and wrote a proposal for establishing a vision rehabilitation center in the Western region of the Kingdom. The proposal was adopted and supported by Prince Talal, Prince Abdul Aziz Bin Ahmed, Dr. Ahmed Mohammed Ali, president of the Islamic Development Bank, and Dr. Akef Magrabi, chairman of Magrabi Eye and Ear Hospital Group. On November 4, 2003, Ebsar was formally registered with the Ministry of Social Affairs as a Saudi foundation for vision impairment and rehabilitation services here. Within 2 years, Ebsar opened a non-profit, charitable clinic for those with visual loss which became the first foundation in the Middle East to provide low vision and blind rehabilitation services for children and adults as well as training for health care professionals and occupational therapists. There is much to commemorate because over the course of the past ten years, Ebsar Foundation has successfully provided care for thousands of people with visual disabilities. The challenging work includes recruiting qualified eye specialists, identifying the needs of each patient, and determining the appropriate magnification requirements. The foundation has procured a supply of highly developed visual aid devices and the specialists train the patient in the proper use of the device, assessing the need for different types of illumination. Additional services offered by Ebsar are counseling, educational and vocational guidance, mobility, orientation training, and computer literacy. Ebsar Foundation has also organized a number of entertaining field trips for children with visual impairments to bookstores, the aquarium in Jeddah, and other recreational attractions. Every year, Ebsar Foundation launches public awareness campaigns and conducts activities on World Sight Day, such as eye screening at public schools throughout the Kingdom to identify students with below average vision and help them get the professional attention they need. Ebsar has also designed informational brochures and distributed them to eye clinics and hospitals to increase the eye care professionals' awareness about vision loss, organized lectures and visits of their specialized team to hospitals, and provided consultancy in the setting up of low vision clinics for several hospitals in the Kingdom. Although Bellow has much to celebrate, he also has much more work to tackle and he hopes to raise funds for the clinics, high-tech devices, and awareness campaigns, which he hopes to attain at the upcoming event marking the 10th anniversary of Ebsar Foundation.
