A Flight for Sight: Nine Children, One Plane, and a Chance to See Clearly

June 23, 2026

It should take 30 years for someone to reach the stage where they’re in danger of going blind, but in South Sudan we’re seeing it in children as young as 3, 4, or 5.

Angelia Sanders

Senior Associate Director in the Carter Center’s Trachoma Control Program

The blue-and-white prop plane descended through clear skies and skimmed along a scorching runway. After it slowed to a halt, five children — some of them barefoot — made their way down the plane’s three deep stairs, blinking in the harsh sunlight as they took in this place where they’d suddenly found themselves.

Just an hour earlier, they’d been lounging in a field waiting for the plane — the first they’d ever ridden — to take them from their villages in rural South Sudan to its capital, Juba.

They and four other children who arrived on a second flight were there for the same reason: to undergo eyelid surgery to halt damage caused by trachoma.

The state of their eyes shocked public health experts.

Pediatric nurse anesthetist Grazilla Thomas gives 7-year-old Loro Awan a clean bill of health after a pre-surgery check. In addition to recording their age and weight, Thomas listened to the children’s hearts and lungs to make sure they were healthy enough to undergo anesthesia.

Carter Center epidemiologist Pallavi Kache photographs one of Loro Awan’s eyes post-surgery. Meticulous documentation will help future researchers and health care specialists provide the best care to young patients.

Trachoma is a bacterial eye infection common where clean water and sanitation are scarce. Repeated infections lead to scarring, causing eyelids to turn inward and eyelashes to scratch the cornea — damage that is painful and can eventually result in blindness.

This process usually plays out over decades, said Angelia Sanders, a senior associate director in the Carter Center’s Trachoma Control Program. “It should take 30 years for someone to reach the stage where they’re in danger of going blind, but in South Sudan we’re seeing it in children as young as 3, 4, or 5.”

A simple surgery can correct an eyelid’s orientation. Carter Center-supported surgeons use local anesthesia to perform the procedure on thousands of adults each year. But children can’t be counted on to lie still as a scalpel approaches their eyes. They need general anesthesia, and that means specialists.

Grazilla Thomas carefully moves a child from the surgical table to a gurney to transport him to the recovery ward. Meanwhile, behind her, a surgeon has already begun working to repair the eyelids of the next child.

That’s why The Carter Center chartered the little prop plane — to bring the children to South Sudan’s only pediatric eye clinic. In all, the kids and their caregivers spent 15 days at the Ministry of Health’s Buluk Eye Centre, sleeping side by side in a ward cooled only by fans, taking morning tea at a stand just outside the compound’s gates, waiting patiently in blue plastic chairs until their
next eye check or meal.

A technician removes the bandages from the eyes of 3-year-old Yayo John as her mother, Lolech, comforts her. Yayo was the youngest of the nine children who received surgery. The oldest was 12.

Lukayele Ngachor receives eye drops from his mother, Kernoi, the day after surgery. Keeping eyes clean and infection-free is a critical part of aftercare.

The surgeries were a success, and the children clambered back up the plane steps free from pain and no longer in danger of imminent blindness.

The Carter Center is now working to help the dozens of other children in South Sudan like them, so that they, too, can enjoy brighter futures — ones in which school, jobs, and a full life are all possibilities