International Eyesight Mission Right Here in Denver
An International Eyesight Mission Right Here in Denver
On Saturday, November 7, District 6C redefined the meaning of “international.” For some time, my wife Lion Susy Osorio has had a dream to conduct a comprehensive vision screening here in Denver for members of the refugee and immigrant communities. Months ago, we realized that Denver had a good site for this in the eastern part of the city. Hidden Brook Apartments at Xenia and 13th is a residence for a number of East Asian refugees, and it coincidentally is the same place where Susy and I attended a meeting back in early May to draw attention to the plight of Nepalese after the devastating earthquake Nepal suffered in late April. Hidden Brook and nearby Grace Apartments house refugees from Burma and Nepal. Earlier this year, we were introduced to the resident managers there, who were thrilled to understand what we were trying to do. The word got out to these two locations and to the entire neighborhood that residents would be able to have their vision screened and eyeglasses provided. In addition, Susy connected with the Denver Latino community via radio, TV and word-of-mouth advertising, and we anticipated a fairly large number of Spanish-speaking participants as well.
Our expectations were met. We ended up seeing over 300 people - and were disheartened only to realize that in the limited, 5-hour timespan we’d allotted for the project (which actually became 7 hours, when all was said and done), we’d have to turn away about 150 more. We had interpreters for 4 different languages on hand to help us along - Burmese, Karen, Nepali and Spanish! The exact final tally is not in yet, but we know that we distributed hundreds of recycled eyeglasses for both distance (single vision lenses for both near- and far-sighted diagnoses) and close-up (readers for middle-aged participants with presbyopia) and would be referring 35 people to local optometrists for custom-made eyeglasses when needed. The project was a complete success.
Maybe we can do another in the near future. Maybe we can use projects like this to advertise to the Denver community what we do as Lions. Twenty-five volunteers - seven from the Denver and Park Hill Dens, fifteen from the refugee and Latino communities and three translators from Spring Institute - helped out, several of them staying the full seven hours. Lions Clubs deserves a lot of credit for creating the event, planning for it and recruiting volunteers and then executing it with grace and style. In the future, Susy and I hope to get the word out to more and more Lions in both 6C and beyond, in the hope of widening the scope of volunteer support even more.
Many thanks to the Denver Lions for helping – Tish Taylor, Carl Mason, Marie Belew and Jim Hannifin.