From swim schools to eye clinics: how families of 7/7 victims used heartbreak to help others

Children in Belize attending a swimming project set up in memory of Fiona Stevenson, who was killed in the Aldgate bombing. Photograph: Stevenson family/CAF

In the city of Bhubaneswar, the capital of the north-east Indian state of Odisha, there is an eye clinic that has transformed the lives of thousands of children.

Before the unit was established in 2008, according to its vice-chair, there was no dedicated children’s eye care centre in the entire eastern part of India, a country home to 20% of the world’s blind children. The clinic now sees about 3,000 children a month and performs 350 eye surgeries – a significant proportion of them at no cost to the often very poor families who need them.