Elizabeth Tan has always been one step ahead of her peers. As an undergraduate, to fund her own university education, she started a company called Uberture Events that organises parties and events for colleges. The company did so well that she made more than $2,000 every month, which she saved after paying her tuition fees.
A few years after graduating with a History degree in 2007, she also founded Sight To Sky (STS), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) which organises annual mobile eye clinics to poor communities in the Himalayas.
In 2010, she embarked on a two-month sojourn to India which changed her life.
In New Delhi, she attended a talk by Venerable Karma Lekshe Tsomo, a Buddhist nun, scholar and social activist who is also a professor of Buddhism and World Religions at the University of San Diego.
“She had built many schools in India. I was so inspired that I went up to her and asked to volunteer at her schools,” she says.
The nun told Ms Tan she could teach English at a school in Zangla, a remote village in Ladakh. The school was in a nunnery and operated by 15 nuns who cared for abandoned girls.
Ms Tan, who taught English in the afternoons, stayed there for more than six weeks.
Her stay in Ladakh made her realise how much medical attention was lacking in the remote region. Because of the high altitude, the people are constantly exposed to harsh rays from the sun resulting in unusually high rates of cataract and other UV-related vision problems.
Ms Tan’s life turned an unexpected corner when one of her pupils, a bright seven-year-old girl called Lobsang, stopped turning up for classes one day.
Her father’s cataracts had become so bad he could no longer see and work in the fields. Lobsang’s mother had to take over as breadwinner while the little girl had to cook, clean and mind her younger siblings.
Ms Tan was so determined to help Lobsang and her family that when she came back to Singapore, she looked up NGOs which offer medical help to poor communities and found Global Clinic.
Ms Tan spent six months organising a mobile eye clinic, a project she named Sight To Sky (STS). In 2012, she took a team of three doctors and nine volunteers to Ladakh.
Unfortunately, because of political tensions near the Pakistan border, the team could not get a permit to go to the Zanskar region where Zangla is during that first expedition.
So they went to seven large villages in the Indus valley instead, camping under the stars and setting up their clinic in schools or the village chief’s home where they would screen, assess and prescribe medication and reading glasses for eye problems.
Since then, she has organised a mobile medical clinic every year. She reconnected with Lobsang in 2014 and managed to raise funds for her father’s cataract operation in a regional hospital.
In 2015, together with marketing professional Woon Fei Xiang and film-maker Edwin Lee, she turned STS into a charity.
Besides eye treatments, it now offers dental services as well as consultations for women’s problems. The outfit has also recently started STS Journeys, a social enterprise arm which runs tours in the Himalayas, proceeds of which go back to the charity.
Last year STS raised funds and worked with a Hungarian architect to build a solar school in Tanpo. Using only locally sourced materials and labourers, the building is designed to store and collect solar energy and is also installed with solar lights.
“It really grounds me. Bringing volunteers to Ladakh and seeing them experience what I did is life-changing,” said Ms Tan.
Watch her video story below:
Read more here.
Source: The Straits Times, 6 May 2018