Children's Vision Program

During a 2004 trip to Bolivia I discovered that there does not exist a program for screening young children for vision problems as is common here in the USA. At the same time the cost of a private eye exam and corrective eyeglasses is totally out of reach of the poorest children, the indigenous kids for the most part.

Enabling children to see well seems like a worthwhile thing to do for a lot of reasons.

So, Dharma to the rescue.

In partnership with Solidarity Bridge, we established the "Children's Vision Program" and hired a Bolivian coordinator and three assistants to go into the schools and orphanages in the poorest areas and test the kids for vision problems.

Those who test with problems are taken on Saturdays to an opthamologist for a complete eye exam. The opthamologist provides a prescription for eyeglasses for each child which are then emailed to Dharma in batches.

We in turn, email the prescriptions to China where our agent arranges the manufacture. The finished glasses are then sent by Fed Ex to Bolivia for distribution to the children. Dharma covers all the costs to enable this to happen.

The plan is to screen 6000 children a year with an estimated 20% needing glasses or 1200 glasses.

We have started in Cochabamba and if all goes well, we would look at expanding the program into other cities in Bolivia and perhaps other countries as well.

It is now mid 2008 and it has taken a while to get this going. Lot's of delays and problems but it's picking up speed now and we are near on target to screen at the rate of 6000 kids per year and provide glasses more than 1200 children.

How cool is that!