This Sudbury optician is bringing 1,500 glasses to people in Kenya

A Sudbury optician is packing his suitcases for a ten day trip to Kenya.

But instead of clothes and toiletries, Bryan Todd's luggage will be filled with 1,500 pairs of eyeglasses.

He will be performing vision assessments and distributing glasses to those in need, from a children's home in Nairobi called Zawadi la Tumaini.

Todd has previously volunteered on two other similar trips, to Belize in 2004 and Malawi in 2016.

He says for people who live in poverty, being able to see can make a dramatic difference.

"If you don't have any vision, you really don't have much of a future to be able to better yourself," Todd says.

"At least when these people do put on a pair of eyeglasses for the first time that they can see, it certainly gives them an opportunity to better their life."

Todd and another optician will use a portable refracting unit attached to an iPhone to help determine a person's prescription.

Then they will try to find the best match from their selection of glasses, that have all been donated by people from Sudbury.

The match isn't always exact, but Todd says they try their best to help improve everyone's vision.

'It's just non-stop'

He says that the demand for better vision is high in these poor communities, and even working 12 hour days barely scratches the surface.

"You can start at 7 o'clock in the morning and you've got a hundred people already lined up. And then you can look out at 12 o'clock in the afternoon and there's two hundred people," he says.

"So it's just non-stop, you could spend two weeks there and you still wouldn't be able to catch up with what the requirements are over there."

For Todd, the experience is a good reminder of what people in Canada take for granted.

"These individuals don't even have shoes, and you're at least able to provide them with a pair of glasses."