Besides being one day closer to your weekend, Oct. 14, 2010 is also World Sight Day, celebrated every second Thursday in October. Bet you couldn’t see that on your calendar because it was written in size 8 font! Go ahead, grab your glasses. We’ll wait. See it now? Don’t be embarrassed; most Americans couldn’t spot it either.
That’s because 174 million Americans correct their vision in some way, the bulk of which is through glasses or contact lenses. Provided that figure doesn’t include cosmetically bifocaled hipsters, that’s more than half of the American population that benefits from vision correction.
In the developing world, just as many people need glasses, but far fewer get them. Glasses are expensive, of course, and opticians aren’t around to provide them. According to Global Vision 2020, there’s just one optician for every 8 million people in Mali versus 1 in 8,000 in the developed world.
Global Vision 2020 is one organization that’s helping the poor see. They’re doing so in a very practical, and possibly, unfashionable way.
See the glasses to the right? Those are self-adjustable silicon oil eyeglasses, invented by atomic physicist Joshua Silver and manufactured for $19 a pair. Global Vision 2020 has donated thousands of the glasses to aid organizations currently embedded in some of the world’s most desperate areas, where they’re passed off to people who need them most. The nonprofit wants to donate thousands more.
You can help in one of two ways: by donating directly to Global Vision 2020 or by buying a pair of glasses from Indivijual Custom Eyewear. In honor of World Sight Day, the company will donate a set of self-adjustable glasses to Global Vision 2020 for every pair of frames sold.
Want to sport Silver’s creation on your face? Sorry. It doesn’t appear the American public can purchase his self-adjustable glasses. Sometimes the third world hipsters get all the good stuff.
Photo via Global Vision 2020.