Sheena Ruparelia: Bukedea Eye Camp Was About Giving People Their Lives Back

By Gad Masereka 

As the curtain came down on the three-day Rajiv Ruparelia Memorial Eye Camp in Bukedea, Sheena Ruparelia took a moment to reflect on what the outreach had truly meant, not in statistics, but in the quiet transformations she had witnessed across the hospital grounds.

“We are not just screening eyes,” she said. “We are giving people back their lives, their livelihoods, their independence. A grandmother who can now see her grandchildren. A farmer who can return to his land. A child who can go back to school and see the blackboard. That is what this camp is about.”

Sheena, a director in the Ruparelia Group, played an active role in the camp’s execution alongside her parents Sudhir and Jyotsna Ruparelia. The outreach, funded to the tune of UGX 1.7 billion by the Ruparelia Foundation and its partners, was organised in memory of her late brother Rajiv Ruparelia, whose deep belief in philanthropy had long inspired similar initiatives during his lifetime.

“Rajiv would have been here. He would have been the first to roll up his sleeves and get involved. Organising this camp in his name is the most meaningful way we can keep his spirit present,” she said.

Over the three days, the camp screened thousands of patients from across the Teso sub-region, conducted hundreds of cataract surgeries and procedures for children, and distributed reading and prescription glasses to those who needed them. What struck Sheena most, she said, was not the scale of the operation but the individual moments of restoration that unfolded throughout, including the image of 104-year-old Esther Amoding receiving a wheelchair from her father, and the farmer who had not seen clearly in a decade blinking into a new world after surgery.

“People travelled for hours to be here. Some came from Kenya. That tells you everything about the need,” she said. “And it tells you everything about why we will keep doing this.”