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Community Focus:
Eyesight project

There are an incredible number of children in Lima who are in need of glasses, but not aware of this problem or cannot afford them. Poor vision has a large impact on a child's education, and can negatively affect his or her future.

As a group of four 8th grade students at Colegio Roosevelt, Iñigo Marín, Conrad Anguera, Cris Stanton and I started a community focus project to do something about this. Our assignment was to go out into the Peruvian community and do something positive. We discovered the eyesight problem and chose it as our project. Projects chosen by other groups varied from cancer and AIDS to hydroponics and recycling.

We started out ambitiously, but then realized we could not help every child in Lima, so we decided to focus on a certain group in Chorrillos called the “Mensajeros de la Paz,” that is sponsored by the Spanish government and focused on taking care of children, ages 6 to 12, with dysfunctional home lives. We also contacted Dr. Raul Cordero from the Clinica Anglo-Americano, and he agreed to help out.

We were taught how to examine children using charts and letters, and planned to examine the children. We drove to Chorrillos and conducted primary examinations called visual acuity tests. There were 61 children present the day of our exam, and 26 out of them did not have 20/20 vision. The next step was to take the exam to the professionals. All the children were thoroughly examined, and it turned out that 23 out of the 26 children were in need of glasses.

Some were extreme cases caused by intense astigmatism. Two children needed progressive correction, meaning they had to wear glasses for three months, and then get stronger glasses to wear from then on.

The clinic offered to provide us with all the new frames and lenses for a total of $805 dollars…so we needed to raise some money. We sought out local businesses to act as sponsors for our project. We first made a presentation to executives at Repsol, then sent out e-mails to several other local businesses and made follow-up phone calls to Banco Sudamericano, AFP Horizonte, and Edelnor, all of whom made contributions, as did a number of generous individuals. We raised a total of $1,650 US dollars, more than double what we needed. With the remaining money, we decided to create a fund for future glasses. This fund will also cover repair costs and glasses for new children who enter the community.

Back at Mensajeros de la Paz, we learned that the glasses could not be given right away; first, the parents of the children needed to pay some money -- a type of insurance policy -- that would be returned after a year when the parents would show that the glasses had been taken care of properly.

Time came to give a final presentation to the parents of the children on how to take care of the glasses. We said our goodbyes to the kids, and gave the glasses to Roberto Fernández, the director of Mensajeros de la Paz.

Children have been given a chance for a better education, and this is a step in the right direction. We believe that our project has proven successful, and hope that this motivates others to improve our community. A smile on a child's face is more than satisfactory. -- Winsor Wesson

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