District 4-C4 has been a part of the Lions In Sight family for many years. Each year we gather more than a ton of eye glasses and deliver them to the regional In Sight facility in Vallejo, CA. As a service to Lions who may be new to our District, and as a tribute to all the Lions that make recycling eye glasses possible, we offer this annotated gallery of photos that follows the eye glasses from their collection to their distribution at Lions vision clinics all over the world.

Here is a typical collection center. In this case, a simple collection box that sits beside the community bulletin board at the Santa Clara County Library. People bring their glasses and we empty the box about every six weeks. Every participating club has dozens of these boxes scattered about their community.

The collected glasses accumulate in boxes and bags. Then club members sort them into boxes, separating glass cases from glasses, and removing those (usually only a few) that are damaged beyond repair. In the end, we have a big pile of boxes all filled with useable glasses.
     

In March, all the participating Clubs in the District cart the glasses they have collected to the Central Collection Center - that is, the garage and patio of a volunteer Lion. Here, they are unloaded, weighed, reciepted

    and ...

... stored until they can be trucked up to the recycling depot in Vallejo, CA.

The Vallejo facility of Lions In Site is the west coast intake and redistribution center. It handles many hundreds of thousands of eye glasses annually and is staffed by Lion volunteers from the northern tier of Multiple Distirct 4.

Comprehensive training is provided so that the volunteers can sort, clean, classify, and package eye glasses.

Collected glasses are analyzed using special machines that can read all their perscripton variables, the results are displayed on an interactive screen, and then the perscription is printed on a small ticket that is attached to the glasses.

The tagged glasses then go to the sorting table where they are grouped by closely related perscriptions. Then they are packed into the corresponding shoe boxes.

From Vallejo, these boxes are shipped to permanent clinics around the world, donated to other organizations that are operating clinics, or taken by volunteer Lions to our own special clinics in regions where there are no regular services. The majority of clinics that we operate out of California are in Mexico in cooperation with local Lions Clubs there. The pictures that follow come from a clinic held in cooperatiion with the Buenaventura Lions Club.

Lion vision clinics are staffed by two sets of volunteers. The first is a group of around eight to twelve that drops in carrying up to two thousand pairs of glasses and the medical equipment necessary to run the clinic. It usually includes three doctors and five to ten helpers who are familiar with clinic operations. The second group consists of the members of a local Lions club, usually 20 to 40 strong, who arrange the venue for operating the clinic, advertise it regionally, provide housing for the those coming from afar, translation and referral services, and help run the clinic.

Registration is the first step. Each person is given a form that will accumulate information as they go through the stations of the clinic. It also creates a medical record for those who have health issues that will need to be addressed outside the clinic.

From registration, patients go to Diabetes Screening, which includes the usual blood test and body mass index. In the Buenaventura Clinic, the Buenaventura Lions Club provided trained personnel for the diabetes screening.

The next station is the Eye Chart Exam. This exam uses a universal eye chart with the letter E turned in various directions. The results are recorded, and the patient moves on to ...

... the eye perscription examination, followed by an eye health exam.

If the diabetes screening or the eye health examination uncover an underlying medical problem, the patient is directed to the Referral Station. Here the patient is referred to an appropriate agency or Lions program that can deal with the problem.

Otherwise, the usual outcome is to join the perscription line and become another satisfied customer. For this grandmother, getting her first pair of eye glasses was like rolling back the years to a time when she was younger and could see clearly. And they're bifocals, so she can also read to those grand kids.

For more about the programs of Lions In Sight, visit Lions In Sight