January 10, 2024
Dear Friends,
I’m writing to tell you how much work the team at John Fawcett Foundation Indonesia are doing. In the last three months we have performed cataract surgeries which takes the projected number over this calendar year to 4500 which is 700 more than last year. Also, we have screened 55,000 people, our largest number ever. This is largely achieved by the team travelling and taking the mobile clinics to Java and their services to eastern parts of Indonesia over longer distances than usual. The team have been incredibly busy, and it was a great pleasure for the board to meet with them in August this year.
Gede Bingin, our manager in Bali, has done an absolutely fantastic job, bringing the team’s activity back up to and beyond pre-Covid activity in the space of 12 months. We have been looking carefully at our equipment, and our mobile clinic vans are becoming older and in need of refurbishment. Also, the microscopes used for the delicate eye surgery are now more than 20 years old and have suffered somewhat from the bumpy roads and humidity. They need urgent replacement and the total cost for replacing three microscopes is about $120,000. This would give our surgeons a much safer working environment, and in particular our patients a safer receiving environment. Our surgeons have been doing an absolutely sterling effort and, with the increase in activity, some aspects of our equipment quality have been highlighted.
We would love to be able to refurbish the vans and the replace the microscopes early in the new year, and so my New Years appeal to all of you is to try and think of all of the people in Indonesia, who lack access to good quality cataract surgery and other eye services that we provide. Every donation that you are able to make has a tremendous impact positively on their lives. As we think of our friends and family this New Year, I want to thank you for being part of our family. And I want to thank you in advance for your very generous support.
My very best wishes.
Bill Morgan.
Chairman of the Board JFF
