Today is World Sight Day! A cause very close to our heart here at Retrospecced.
World Sight Day (“WSD”) is an international day of awareness to focus attention on the global issue of eye health. Uncorrected poor vision is the world’s most common disability, with over 1.3 billion people affected worldwide. The majority of these cases could be corrected by a simple eye examination and a pair of glasses.
An eye examination being carried out
Some facts:
80% of all blindness and moderate or severe distance vision impairment is considered avoidable
55% of moderate or severely vision impaired people are women
89% of vision impaired people live in low- or middle- income countries
200 billion dollars’ worth of productivity is lost every year because so many people do not have the glasses they need to see properly to do their job.
Our partner charity, Vision Aid Overseas ("VAO"), provide vital eyecare across Africa.
53,592 eye tests have been carried out through VAO's activities in the last 12 months
31,781 pairs of glasses have been prescribed through VAO's activities in the last 12 months
We donate 20% of what we sell each frame for directly to them on your behalf, to help support their amazing work. Just £5 can provide an eyetest and a pair of glasses – so each frame we sell equates to at least this! We're really proud of our relationship with VAO.
To celebrate World Sight Day we want to do a bit more though, so for every frame sold over the next 7 days we will double our donation to Vision Aid Overseas! By buying your upcycled frames from us, you’ll also be supporting their amazing work providing vision care across Africa.
2014 - -INDIA and UGANDA: Photographer Graeme Robertson traveled to India and Uganda to photograph Sightsavers programs as part of his upcoming show in London.
3rd December 2014 is International Day of Persons with Disabilities and one year on from the launch of the Put Us in the Picture campaign. Sightsavers wants to use this day to celebrate the success achieved to date, thank supporters and inspire, engage and motivate people to continue to put pressure on the government.
To date the main focus has been on the political process and audiences, but we now need to build on the public campaign, and the 13,000 supporters who have already signed up, to show decision makers that this is an issue people care about. By increasing public support, we can put pressure on politicians to ensure they carry out their promises.
Coverage will provide an opportunity for me to connect with a wider public audience of politically aware readers in order to raise awareness of the issues and continue to build momentum and public support for the campaign.
The content gathered on the trip and the accompanying TV crew (along with the exhibition on the 3rd of DEC in East london) will give people with disabilities an opportunity to tell their stories. It will bring their stories to life through words, images and audio, so the public can experience what it’s like for people with disabilities living in developing countries and feel moved and inspired to support the cause.
Using the power of individual personal stories we will demonstrate the barriers people with disabilities in developing countries face and the impact this is having on their lives and those around them.
We will also show the alternative side of the story - how it doesn’t have to be this way – that there is huge potential to transform their lives and those of their families and wider community given the right interventions.
Portraits at home
( Photograph by Graeme Robertson)
For the last twenty years, eye-specialist Dr. Richárd Hardi has been healing people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the heart of Africa. Richárd works in Mbuji-Mayi, the centre of a province twice the size of Hungary, in the only well equipped operating theatre in the region. From here he sets out in all directions into the outlying corners of the province, to give a chance to those patients who live 600-800 km away from the ophthalmology centre. As public transport is non-existent, the patients (often the elderly and children) make the journey on foot. The patients, frequently totally blind by then due to cataracts, arrive at Richárd’s temporary surgery in bicycle baskets or hanging on to relatives. As Richárd puts it, “Travelling 300-400 kilometres on these roads is like asking some relative of a Budapest patient to push their seventy year old blind grandmother to Paris in a bicycle basket...” For many, this is their only chance not to live out the rest of their lives blind and vulnerable in the corner of a mud hut. Although the decisive majority of the patients are suffering from simple cataracts. Due to the strength of the equatorial sun and the lack of screening, this region is particularly affected by cataract cases, even though this disease is treatable by a routine 15 minute operation. The exemplary story of Doctor Hardi, who has so far restored the sight of up to eight thousand people, is presented by the photographer in a series on the treatment of Mbedji, an eight year of girl. The little girl has not been able to see with either eye since the age of four. Her grandmother brought her to the operation from Nkembe, 80 kilometres away. She led her granddaughter by the hand for most of the way, but carried her on her back over the more hazardous sections. As it could not be known when they could undertake such a long journey again, the doctor broke with protocol and operated on both of the girl’s eyes, thus restoring the little girl’s sight.
Thank you to IAPB for the images and facts in this post! Head on over totheir website tofind out more!
Shop our range of upcycled frames now! For each pair bought, we will double our donation to Vision Aid Overseas from 20% to 40% of the frame price until 17th October 2019!
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