Heritage Lions Collect 10,000 Eyeglasses
Somewhere in your home may be a pair of eyeglasses you have not worn in years.
Perhaps they are sitting in a drawer, a desk or a bathroom cabinet. You may have forgotten about them. But those glasses are not necessarily useless. The Heritage Lions collect over 10,000 pairs of eyeglasses each year from over 45 locations in Allen County. Optometrists, Allen County Public Libraries, YMCAs, Indiana Physical Therapy, nursing homes and funeral homes throughout the area sponsor these collection boxes.
After sorting out all of the cases and the broken glasses, the Heritage Lions bring the good glasses to Arcola for their twice a year sorting session in Lion John Gellar’s barn. The Arcola Lions Club take sorted eyeglasses to the The Wanatah Lions Club’s collection center in District 25A.
There Lions members from all over Northern Indiana sort over 15,000 pairs of used eye-glasses. Sort categories include: men’s and women’s, children’s, reading glasses and sunglasses. After the Arcola sort, The Wanatah Lions Club works with the Westville Correctional Facility where prisoners clean, repair, and most importantly read the prescriptions to catalog them for dispensing on missions trips.
The glasses will eventually be shipped with missions to Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico and other countries that lack the resources to manufacture these necessary items. At the mission site, eye care professionals and trained Lion volunteers perform vision screenings and dispense the appropriate recycled glasses, free of charge, to children and adults in need.
Worldwide, millions of people live with vision impairment that could be improved with appropriate eye care and corrective lenses. For people in communities where eye examinations and eyeglasses are difficult to obtain or afford, a simple pair of donated glasses can make an enormous difference. When they receive these glasses from the Lions, their lives are changed forever.
Imagine, for a moment, a six-year-old girl we will call María. She places the glasses onto her face, looks across the room and for the first time sees the faces of the people around her clearly. She can now see the writing on the blackboard. She can read a book.
She can remain in school rather than falling behind because she cannot see. Multiply this times many millions and you can appreciate the power of this Heritage and International Lions project. All from gathering used eyeglasses that would have otherwise gone into a landfill.
Please consider placing your unneeded eyeglasses, sunglasses, reading glasses and hearing aids/batteries in any of the collection boxes located throughout northern Indiana.
Help the Lions help the less fortunate to see clearly, perhaps for the first time in their lives. This project is a perfect example of the Heritage Lions motto: “We Serve”.
