The mission of EYES ON AFRICA, is to provide eyeglasses at no cost to Africans with no access to vision care. We have established reliable contacts in Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia. These partners distribute the glasses through various community centers, clinics etc. and provide us with photo documentation. Every year, I personally travel to Uganda (at my own expense) where the Eyes on Africa team conducts distributions in various villages. See photos at
www.eyesonafrica.info
Our current project is to distribute glasses in the refugee camps in Gulu, northern Uganda, where people have been displaced for twenty years. Only recently have the warlord's rebels receeded , making it safe for refugees to leave the camps and return to their villages. The camps are home to tens of thousands of people, that Ugandans refer to as a "lost generation". The scope of our pilot project is to work with community leaders to distribute 2,000 pairs of glasses to the camps. We will be working in conjunction with local empowerment and sufficiency projects. As people learn to read, do beadwork, carpentry, and other crafts, they will have eyeglasses that make their work possible (see photo above of Mwibi, a carpenter, from Kawempe, Uganda).
The importance of eyeglasses to the empowerment and self-sufficiency of an individual is obvious to those of us who rely on (and perhaps take for granted) our eyeglasses. We can't do without!
With the Eyes on Africa team in place in Uganda (including Gulu), we are poised to implement this project in the camps, and continue the distributions already established in other villages.