Sechelt resident Robert Dawson helps give people in Third World countries the gift of sight - and he's looking for like-minded locals to give him a hand.
Dawson is a member of the Third World Eye Care Society of Canada (TWECS), whose mission is to collect new or used eyeglasses and give them to needy people in developing countries. The mission seems simple, but much work needs to be done before someone in a Third World country is given their free pair of glasses.
The glasses first must be donated by people who are no longer in need of them at various optometrist offices or eyeglass stores. Thousands of glasses are donated from all over B.C. They are shipped to a warehouse in Burnaby where volunteers sort them and discard anything unusable.
"If they are badly scratched or broken or if they are bifocals, they are thrown out," Dawson said, explaining it is nearly impossible to find someone with the exact same bifocal prescription to make use of those particular types of glasses.
If bifocals are needed, TWECS volunteers simply gift two pairs of glasses to suit the different prescription needs.
But the intense sorting process often leaves TWECS with many fewer glasses to give out than what was actually donated. "About 60 per cent of what is sent in, we are not able to use," Dawson said.
He has recently started taking boxes of glasses back to his home in West Sechelt to sort through and clean, as the warehouse is having trouble with the daily sorting. He has committed to sorting through hundreds of glasses in his spare time, but he needs help to clean the glasses before they go to be labelled and bagged for their journey, which will take them to Nicaragua this year.
"If people can volunteer to run the glasses through a dishwasher, dry them off and return them to me, that would be helpful," he said.
Dawson is a retired optician. He will be volunteering his services in Nicaragua this year, where he will meet with hundreds of people in need of glasses. After a free eye exam, he will fit them with what might be their first pair of glasses ever.
It's something Dawson has been doing with TWECS for nearly four years. "There is absolutely no way to describe the feeling of giving someone who is literally blind the gift of sight," Dawson said.
In 2009 he had what he refers to as "the privilege" of fitting an 18-year-old youth in Ethiopia with the first glasses he ever had. Before donning the spectacles, the young man couldn't even read the large E on the eye chart.
"So I turned him towards the window and it hit him when he could see the mountains. He turned around and wrapped his arms around me and said, 'I love you, man.' The excitement in the air was contagious. His name is Tariku and we walked around the hospital grounds, and with his friend as interpreter, we just named all the things he never saw before. What a day," Dawson recalled.
For more information, or to help, contact Dawson at 604-885-6714 or learn more at www.twecs.ca.
