Dr. Damji offers a unique “sandwich” fellowship, allowing doctors from developing countries who are unable to leave their hospitals or families for longer-term fellowships by separating the training into a number of rotations, allowing them a split schedule between time abroad and time in their home country. What is further unique about this fellowship model is that it focuses on leadership training and allows Dr. Damji to visit Dr. Marco in her local surroundings. This allows a unique training perspective in the natural environment of the fellowship doctor and an opportunity to build institutional capacity and thus an enabling environment to help retain the newly qualified specialist. The goal is to build local capacity in order to better identify and prevent blindness from glaucoma, which is all to common particularly in African individuals over the age of 30. To this end, Dr. Damji will be in Kenya, working with Dr. Marco, in August for an ORBIS sponsored hospital-based program with a concentration on glaucoma.

This will be Dr. Damji’s second glaucoma fellow from Nairobi. Previously he facilitated a glaucoma fellowship for Dr. Dan Kiage, now President of OSEA (Ophthalmology Society of East Africa) and head of the section of Ophthalmology at the Aga Khan University Hospital.

FedEx Corp., an ORBIS global sponsor and leading member of the Alliance for Sight, generously sponsored the Nairobi Flying Eye Hospital program. During both weeks, FedEx Express volunteer team members worked side-by-side with the ORBIS staff converting the DC-10 aircraft into the world’s only Flying Eye Hospital and helped deliver targeted public advocacy programs aimed at educating the public on better eye healthcare practices.

“The FedEx Fellows program has been a great success since its launch in 2006 and we are proud to contribute to the ophthalmic community all over the world,” said Robert W. Elliott, president, FedEx Express Europe, Middle East, Indian Subcontinent and Africa. “By supporting the training of ORBIS and the University of Nairobi, we aim to provide a boost to the ophthalmic expertise in Kenya by enabling local doctors to learn from the very best in their field, and then return to the frontline of blindness prevention work in their local communities.”

During the two week program, ORBIS worked side-by-side with hands-on and participant level trainees from several prominent eye hospitals in the Nairobi area who are responsible for providing the surgical and clinical components of the U of N’s ophthalmology resident training program. The focus of the training will be to increase the ability of consultant ophthalmologists to provide and train in subspecialty ophthalmic care, specifically glaucoma, pediatric ophthalmology, cornea, oculoplastics and medical retina. In conjunction with the Flying Eye Hospital program, ORBIS introduced Cyber-Sight, ORBIS’ telemedicine program into the resident training curriculum in order to upgrade the university’s ophthalmic training infrastructure.