According to the World Health Organization, some 285 million people worldwide are visually impaired, and 28 million are fully blind. Of the former, 90 percent live in low-income areas, predominantly in developing countries.

Tragic as these figures are, for many of the well-sighted, it’s an abstract horror. This Friday at 11 pm EST, in their segment “Beating Blindness,” Vice on HBO hopes to bring the issue closer to home,

VICE correspondent Isobel Yeung traveled to Ethiopia to showcase the struggles and triumphs of the Himalayan Cataract Project, a non-profit organization in existence since 1995. According to the HCP itself, their collaborative efforts to fund and facilitate eye care treatment have reached over 5.2 million people in 16 countries and led to nearly half a billion surgical procedures.

Elsewhere, the segment will report on innovative new technologies and advances in surgery that are allowing people to see for the first time in decades, if ever, and on the mixed bag of emotions that comes with restored sight.

It’s sure to be a compelling experience.