Broken and glued with clay
The 30-year-old glasses of Joseph Levious
In rural Malawi, teams from GoodVision travel from village to village to carry out eye tests on site as part of eye camps. The journey to the city is often long and expensive, and glasses are usually unaffordable for people from the countryside. Our eye camps are therefore the only way for many people to get glasses.
At the eye camp in the Ndaula Health Center, about 50 kilometers from the capital Lilongwe, we noticed Joseph waiting for his eye test with a very strange pair of glasses. The eye test revealed an unusually high myopia of -9.00 diopters. Without glasses you are considered blind with this refractive error.
For 30 years, he has guarded his scratched, cloudy and poorly glued glasses.
Joseph's spectacles were scratched, bent, broken several times and had been hastily glued together with clay, the lenses as cloudy as frosted glass. Nevertheless, he guarded his glasses like a treasure because he could still see a little better with them than without.
Joseph says that he was given the glasses as a gift in a hospital. He couldn't move around without his glasses, let alone carry out his work as a farmer. Over the years, he lived with the constant fear that his glasses might one day break completely. Until our eye camp.
Speechless with joy
Joseph was speechless when he finally looked through his new OneDollarGlasses. Our whole team felt for him at that moment and was very touched.
