“The role in volunteering does not matter. Doing every task, regardless big or small, whole-heartedly matters more.” This is the exact depiction of the years of volunteering involvements of Dr Li Yuen-mei, Emmy. Regardless of selling flags for fundraising or visiting needy elders in her secondary school days; organizing health exhibitions or serving the sick and poor in India during her university days; or providing voluntary treatment and training in Mainland China over the past decade, Dr Li has never bothered what role or position being assigned to her. She just puts in her best efforts to accomplish every task.

“The society has invested a lot in training doctors. So, I have the responsibility to give back to society. In fact, I always gain more than I give in doing voluntary works. For instance, I earn the trust from those we helped, and the support from peer-volunteers. I have the opportunities to learn handling diseases not commonly found in Hong Kong. Involving in these humanitarian works also help nurture my flexibility, capabilities and optimism towards tackling problems and urgencies.”

Dr Li works with the Hong Kong Eye Hospital. Since graduation in 2004, she has been volunteering with Project Vision, Lifeline Express and Orbis, and has served patients in deprived areas of many provinces in the Mainland. In 2009, she helped coordinate and run the Hainan project for cataract surgery and sight restoration. Within a year, she and her team have conducted some 30,000 surgeries and trained more than 10 Mainland doctors. Over the subsequent three years, she led her teammates to visit over 200 rural villages in Hainan and Chaonan. Besides providing eye check-ups for more than 10,000 villagers during the visits, they also collected data on eye problems of the people, which offered useful references for local authorities to plan on ophthalmic services.

A staunch believer in helping people help themselves, Dr Li and her volunteering teammates have been dedicated to providing systematic and standardized cataract surgical training in the Mainland. Besides providing training and supervision in-person during her frequent visits to the Mainland, she also uses her after-office time in Hong Kong to regularly assess trainees’ performances through reviewing their surgery video-records, and offer feedbacks. She and her teammates strive to ensure that all patients, even those in deprived areas, receive treatments of equally safe and high standards.

In Hong Kong, Dr Li has been active in promoting public awareness on eye care for years through different means such as radio shows, writing in newspapers and public education activities. She was the master-mind of territory-wide eye care education campaigns for students over the last two years. Moreover, through Ripples Action, she helps empower vulnerable groups such as underprivileged women and ethnic minorities by providing them with health talks and free check-ups. She also helps organize “Ten Outstanding Warriors of Regeneration” awards to advocate the self-reliance and achievements of many chronic patients.

Dr Li hopes to share her volunteering experiences with the young generations in the hope of engaging more young people to participate in humanitarian endeavors.