Women in Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution help prepare donated eyeglasses for a Lions Club program
Thursday, November 25, 1999
By Michael Wilson of The Oregonian staff
If you wear glasses, you probably remember that moment, the first time you put them on: Look! Wow! Leaves on the trees across the street, street signs out the car window, stars at night.
In third-world countries, near- and farsightedness often are undiagnosed or ignored by people who are afraid of trips to big-city clinics and doctors. Those with poor eyesight often drop out of the local economic loop, unable, perhaps, to perform close work.
For more than 30 years, the Lions Club has sent donated eyeglasses from the United States to poor areas around the world.
Last week, Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution became a stop on the journey.
Women inmates are being trained to clean and sort thousands of pairs of glasses and test their prescription strength on machines called lensometers.
"The women are very, very excited about this job," said Tamara Chorey, program coordinator at the prison. "Not only for the opportunity to learn more, but they also feel like they're doing some good by providing eyeglasses to people who wouldn't normally have access to this."
So far, the program employs six women working four-hour shifts on weekdays. The prison hopes to increase the work force in the coming weeks, to 15 women working eight-hour days, and eventually be able to handle eyeglasses donations from the entire West Coast -- as many as 7,000 to 10,000 pairs a month.
"The problem has always been, how do we wash them and put a prescription on them before we send them out to a mission field?" said Scott Maguire, chief executive officer of the Oregon Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation.
The Lions Club first turned to inmate labor years ago at San Quentin Prison in California. But crowding and remodeling at the prison forced them to stop.
Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, meanwhile, needed jobs for the women inmates -- there are about 140 at the Pendleton medium-security facility. The women work as orderlies in the housing units, and in the physical plant.
The prison saw an opportunity to provide more jobs to satisfy Measure 17-mandated inmate labor, as well as give the inmates useful training in optometry.
Ann Kniesel, who coordinates work-force development at the prison, called the Lions.
Donations are accepted at optometrists' offices, in all Oregon Safeway stores and in the familiar Lions yellow boxes -- old mailboxes -- where glasses can be dropped, wrapped in a brown paper bag and marked "Lions."
The glasses are collected and transported on the same Sysco food-service truck that delivers meals to the prison.
"This is a no-cost product, really," Maguire said.
The first 16,000 pairs of eyeglasses arrived last week.
Inmates weed out broken lenses and sunglasses, clean the remaining eyeglasses and test their prescriptions in four lensometers.
"When we take eyeglasses down (to other countries), we take them whole, we don't take them apart," Maguire said.
Recent Oregon teams have visited villages in Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti and Sri Lanka, but the glasses sent through the Eastern Oregon prison will be shipped all over the world, Maguire said.
"What they want to do is help someone else," Maguire said of the inmates, "and I think that's pretty cool."