Land of the Blue Sky

Mongolia is a country of about 3 million people, half of them concentrated in the country’s capital of Ulaanbaatar. The remainder of the country, which is the 19th largest country on earth and shares borders China and Russia, consists of vast deserts, dense forests and rolling plains, sparsely populated with the occasional nomadic families and traveling horsemen (men whose livelihood consists of transporting Mongolian horses across the mountain peaks to farmers or nomads on the other side).

In 2008, I first traveled to Mongolia as a medical student to assist in ophthalmic surgeries with the Virtue Foundation. This trip was an inspiring and defining experience in my choice to pursue ophthalmology as a career. Now, 8 years later as a fellow in cornea and external diseases at Doheny, I am returning to Mongolia with my fellowship mentor, Dr. Olivia Lee to perform corneal transplants, with the Virtue Foundation’s support.

Many of the advances in healthcare technology over the last decades are just beginning to take hold in Ulaanbaatar, including eye care. When Olivia and I realized that Mongolia still does not have access to corneal transplantation, and that patients with corneal blindness are unable to get the sight-restoring surgery, we knew we wanted to help.

Today, we are finally on our way thanks to travel funding provided by Virtue Foundation, embarking on an 18-hour journey to Beijing and then to Ulaanbaatar. We are bringing with us 4 large suitcases (donated generously by Samsonite) filled with all the materials we need for eye surgery. In addition, we have a very precious package of donor corneas from our partner, SightLife eye bank. Sighlife’s mission to eliminate corneal blindness worldwide aligns with our interests, as no cornea specialist can perform corneal transplant surgery without donor corneas. They have also provided us with enough extra supplies to design a wet lab training session for the surgeons in Ulaanbaatar, and we have plenty of lectures and lessons planned. We could not be more excited, or more thankful to those organizations, especially Doheny, who gave us the opportunity to be here today.

See you in Mongolia!

We want to thank all of our partners who made this work possible:
The Virtue Foundation
SightLife Eye Bank
See international
Alcon
Karl Storz
Katena
Moria
Samsonite