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West Vancouver teen sets sights on Third World eye care

Charity distributes prescription glasses worldwide
alina ramji

Fifteen-year-old Alina Ramji can’t imagine living without her reading glasses, so it’s hard for her to believe how many people worldwide don’t have access to proper eye care.

“People not having sufficient eye care I find is such a prevalent issue, but it’s not widely known,” says the Rockridge secondary student. “When you think of basic needs, you’re thinking of food, water, shelter, but you’re not thinking about how profound the impact of proper eye care can be on someone’s life.”

To help bring sight to people in need, Ramji spent the last eight months collecting used eyeglasses to donate to the Third World Eye Care Society.

“I go around to eye clinics on the North Shore and I explain to them what I’m doing and they give me used eyeglasses that their customers have come back and donated, or things that they’ve kept and aren’t selling anymore,” she explains.

Just recently, Ramji personally delivered 577 pairs of glasses to Dr. Marina Roma-March, who founded the volunteer-run charity in 1995. Donated eyewear goes to a warehouse in Burnaby where, every Monday night, volunteers separate the items into men’s, women’s, children’s, nearsighted and farsighted categories before washing them. The cleaned and sorted glasses then have their lenses measured in a lensometer. Another volunteer writes the prescription on a label and bundles of glasses with similar prescriptions are catalogued and prepared for shipping with a Third World Eye Care Society team. Teams are made up of 10 or 15 members, including eye surgeons, eye doctors, opticians and lay volunteers, who bring thousands of recycled eyeglasses to areas where residents are unable to obtain glasses or eye care due to poverty or lack of availability. The team sets up mobile clinics in churches, schools or public squares and will examine up to 5,000 people per trip, matching each patient with an appropriate pair of prescription lenses. If an ophthalmologist comes along, cataract surgeries can be performed too.

To date, the charity has helped 80,000 people worldwide and completed projects in the Philippines, India, Guatemala, Malawi and Cambodia, to name just a few. When Ramji heard the organization had previously travelled to Kenya, she was even more motivated to help out.

“My grandparents live in Kenya and I’ve been there five times and you see the poverty,” she says. “It’s just eye-opening seeing just how differently the rest of the world lives.”

Ramji plans to continue her collection campaign, but says she has to wait a while for the local optical stores and eye clinics to accumulate more used and unsold glasses before she can make her rounds again. Come September, she says she’ll also be asking her classmates to contribute their old frames and lenses to the cause.

“It’s something that most people just aren’t aware of. They don’t realize this is such a big issue, but it can make such a big impact when somebody’s actually able to see properly and they have access to this.”
Ramji encourages people who have old eyeglasses tucked away somewhere to drop them off at their local optical store or eye care clinic. To learn about volunteer opportunities, or to donate money directly to the Third World Eye Care Society, visit twecs.ca.

The society is a chapter of Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity International.