Sort and Clean

Tonight we started sorting and cleaning the glasses we have been collecting. A few days ago we picked up 4 big boxes of glasses from the Lion's Club rep and we got to work. It was pretty interesting to go through pair after pair, Brayden at the lensometer reading prescriptions, and Laura cleaning them afterward.

Unite for Sight asked for reading glasses and sunglasses, but no bifocals or glasses with mixed prescriptions or astigmatism correction. This complicated things, luckily this is part of what Brayden does for a living for now as an optician, so that made it easy! At first it was kind of a bummer to see all the 'reject' glasses we can't take with us, but as our pile of glasses we can take got bigger, we were glad to see ourselves getting closer to our goal of 1000 pairs!

It was fun to see the different styles and varieties of glasses. We are pretty sure there was one classy lady who donated at least 7 pairs of very fancy reading glasses, the kind that fold out and have a lovely handle instead of temple pieces. We can't wait to find a group of similarly classy ladies in India who are going to love these! Laura just had to model a pair for your enjoyment.

There was a cool moment when we looked at our cleaning rag and realized it was made in India! There's some circularity for you! It's a small world after all...

Turns out that a lot of people wanted the benefactors to know where their glasses came from. We even got treated to a written description as well as photos displaying the man wearing his glasses. Congratulations college graduate! (wonder what year!) Gold star for whoever can identify what kind of car is shown behind him! It was pretty fun to see this mixed in with bunch of glasses, made the donation a little more personal.

As of today, we are up to sponsoring 15 of our goal of 64 cataract surgeries! Thanks everyone! We're excited to be getting more people involved, thanks to everyone who has helped spread the word about what we're doing with Unite for Sight. Oh, and Happy 2010! Here's to the new year!