Total so far: £928,000

ABDUL LATIF is fretting about his daughter Shazia’s marriage prospects. She is only a child and she has a pretty face but, as a baby, she developed a fever and lingering infection which left her right eye so badly damaged that it had to be removed.

Now 10, she has outgrown the glass eye she was given as a replacement. Her eye socket appears shrunken and the mismatch in size leaves her looking disfigured. To make matters worse, she has begun to lose the sight in her left eye.

Doctors at the Layton Rahmatulla Benevolent Trust (LRBT) eyecare hospital in Karachi are fighting to save her from going blind and have promised to operate to return the right side of her face to a mirror image of the left.

“Shazia feels depressed,” her father said. “She’s a shy girl and in the neighbourhood the other children call her ‘one-eye’.”

Although the main focus of her father’s concern may seem hard-hearted, the future of poor families in Pakistan often depends on their daughters making a good marriage.

Abdul works as a casual bookbinder and earns 200 rupees (£2.28) a day. If Shazia’s sight cannot be saved, he will struggle to find her a husband when she is older.

Shazia requires major surgery to reconstruct her eye socket. “The problem is that the prosthetic is small and she is a growing child,” said Dr Farad Rezvi, the hospital’s leading consultant. Meanwhile, she will have a new prescription for glasses to improve the vision in her severely myopic left eye.

For 21 years the LRBT has been treating cases like Shazia’s, as well as a range of eye problems in adults and children, such as cataracts and glaucoma, that can be cured or helped by simple, inexpensive intervention.

By giving to The Sunday Times Christmas Appeal you could help to support the LRBT, which already carries out more than 20% of all cataract operations in Pakistan.

As in the rest of the world, blindness is an acute problem in Pakistan. Some 1.5m of its people are blind and two-thirds of those are women.

Worldwide, someone goes blind every five seconds; a child goes blind every minute — just under 500,000 a year.

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