Hundreds of Belize City residents are getting screened for free prescription glasses by a team of optical technicians from Christ united Methodist church in the USA. They have been doing it for decades and we visited them at the Wesley Church compound this morning.
Janet Bilhartz, Member, Christ United Methodist Church
"This is a free clinic. And, we collect all of our glasses, which you see right here. They're all donated and they're all prescription glasses. We, all we send everybody through different services throughout to get to the point where we can give them a prescription. It's printed out, and we go through and pull the glasses for them."
"And then they are fitted to the person, and then they walk out and they can see we also have sunglasses that they can take with them if they need it. And, if we have someone that comes in that has got an exceptional bad eyesight, for example, maybe they have cataracts. If they have glaucoma, we have a way to test for that."
"And we also have the ability and some names of doctors here in Belize City that can see those people as patients. So that's basically what we do. We have seen about 200 people yesterday and we'll have about 200 people a day. So at the end of this on Thursday, we will probably have seen and given out free glasses to 800 people."
Brenda Armstrong, Member, Wesley Methodist Church
"The contact between Bishop Claire and the team had been established way back when Reverend was assigned to Epworth Methodist Church. So this time she's our pastor here at Wesley. So the team came to us as well. We have Wesley, a mission and evangelism committee that takes care of these outreach ministries. So I'm a member of that team. And so I get to partner with Janet and the others. We are all volunteers."
The team is made up of 25 volunteers, who have travelled to a number of Central American countries to provide the same care.
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