Two university students joined a Hong Kong charity's medical team in Prey Veng province of Cambodia to eliminate cataract blindness last April.

GX foundation, a non-profit charitable Chinese organization established in Hong Kong in 2018, aims to provide international medical and public health humanitarian assistance in Belt and Road countries.

Around 10 student interns are able to participate in medical fieldwork overseas each year.

They launched their first cataract blindness elimination project in Vientiane, Laos in September last year.

During the pandemic, the charity engaged in distributing masks, visiting elderly care centers and promoting health education, involving 30 students, ranging from high school to postgraduates.

"I have been interested in humanitarian work since a young age. My internship at GX allowed me to apply the professional knowledge learnt in my program into use," said a fourth-year medical student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Jessie Yeung Cheuk-Sze, who joined the foundation as an intern in August 2021.

The student learnt how to use a slit lamp to examine patients' eye condition during the trip. "The doctors were willing to teach us different knowledge instead of thinking we are too young to diagnose patients," she said.

Another intern, Vicky Lee Wai-ki said: "I learnt how to think from the patients' perspective. Patients often feel calm before getting a surgery in Hong Kong, a developed city with a well-established medical system. But operations are a strange term for people in Laos and Cambodia."

The third-year medical student at the University of Hong Kong not only performed operations, but also helped with non-medical yet essential tasks, including promotion and equipment transportation.

More than 2,500 cataract surgeries have been completed since September.

"All 2,500 operations were finished smoothly without any complications," said assistant project director Caroline Dubois.

The foundation aims to complete 9,600 surgeries by the end of this year and provide 37,500 free cataract surgeries to patients in Laos, Cambodia, Djibouti, Senegal and Mauritania by 2027. "We hope our projects and medical technology can be as successful as Doctors Without Borders one day," Dubois said.

From left, Vicky Lee, Jessie Yeung and Caroline Dubois.

Students join charity medical eye team in Cambodia