IB Woman
Issue No. 26 - December/January 2005/06
The OPAL That Really Shines
Dara Lockyer
by Penelope Herbert
Dara Lockyer is passionate: very passionate. For nearly 15 years she and her husband, Geoff have been sourcing, storing, packaging, sending and distributing in-date pharmaceuticals to many of the world’s most critically needy destinations.
Not glamorous: damn hard work. And Dara wouldn’t be doing anything else. The entire length of the wall in her office is crammed with photographs and notes depicting the people and situations that OPAL (Overseas Pharmaceutical Aid for Life) has touched.
“In 1992, I was working as a Senior Dispensary Technician in a pharmacy and Geoff was inspecting potential hotel sites in the Ukraine,” Dara explains.
“Literally a few hours before Geoff was due to fly home he was taken to a children’s hospital in Kiev. With children sharing beds, suffering horrific nuclear reactor burns, no medicines, lying in their own waste and dying before his eyes, what he saw there changed our lives.”
And the lives of tens of thousands of people OPAL has helped since Geoff came back to Adelaide with a great deal of determination and not much more than an idea.
With Dara’s pharmaceutical contacts, she asked Sigma for a donation of medicines. Sigma’s response was overwhelming with numerous pallets of in-date pharmaceuticals that fit the ‘wish list’ Geoff had brought back from the hospital in Ukraine.
“We didn’t expect that level of generosity so the task of sorting and transporting was quite daunting,” says Dara.
“With my background, I started typing up procedural documents that included the brand name, generic name, quantity and expiration date of every medicine. The next step was to actually get the aid consignment to the Ukraine, which was flown over and delivered successfully to the children’s hospital in Kiev.
“It all happened quite quickly, but 1992 was the best Christmas we ever had.”
However, being a former police officer, Geoff is ...
