Ian Hechle, Branch Manager at Conlons in Barrow talks of his travels…
We are excited to announce that we have just launched a fantastic new scheme where we are hoping to send almost £150,000 worth of glasses to Africa in time for Christmas. We are doing this by teaming up with our customers and for every pair of spectacles they buy they receive two free pairs. One pair is donated to helping improve eye care in Africa and the other is for the customer to keep. Customers will fill in a card with their name and a short message which they will put in the box of the glasses that are sent to Ghana.
Eye Aid Africa is a specialist charity that has been set up by a team of medical and eye care professionals to make a difference to eye care in some of the poorer areas of Ghana. About 2.6 million people in West Africa are blind, but about three quarters could have their sight saved with the right medical help. The provision of health care in Ghana is poor, compounded by in a lot of cases by an inability to pay for what little services are available.
Ian says: "To help the charity further I flew out to Ghana on Saturday 23rd October with a team of 10 which included another key member of our staff from Conlons – Alice Joyce. We took 1800 pairs of glasses that Conlons had also donated and collected, and during the one week trip our team performed more than 1,000 eye tests. On Sunday we set out the church hall with the the glasses that we had collected (old and used pairs). The patients started queuing at about 4.00 a.m. on the Monday morning and we arrived at 8.00a.m to begin work and carried on to about 5.30 p.m. with a short break for lunch at 1.00 p.m.It was fairly manic and we dispensed 227 glasses the first day. By the end of Tuesday it was clear we would run out of glasses & had to buy in a load of ready readers and low minus glasses. This exercise was repeated Thursday & Friday and by the time we finished on Friday we had prescribed and dispensed almost 1500 pairs of glasses. There were several magic moments;one student who had never had her eyes tested was prescribed by Alice as -3.25 R&,L, her face lit up with a grin from ear to ear when we gave her the exact rx. Another girl had broken her -10.00 glasses we supplied her with Conlon frames & hi-index Shamir lenses (glazed by the Conlon glazing team) to her exact Prescription">prescription, a very happy lass. There was a crane driver (with no glasses) & with uncorrected v/a of 6/36 we got him to 6/6. A taxi driver with similar uncorrected v/a’s we got to 6/5. There were countless patients who could read for the first time. A very rewarding experience. Whilst we were busy, the consultants (Mark & Patrick) and the ophthalmic nurses (Barbara & Cynthia) were performing about 20 cataract operations per day. I had the privilege to witness one operation at close quarters in the theatre.I hope this begins a long association for Conlons & Eyeaid"