"Glasses are Like Magic"

Of all his classmates, Zhao Liangliang wakes up the earliest and goes to bed the latest.

Three years ago, his father was injured in a mining accident and has been out of work since. With his father unable to even tend their modest plot of land, the burden fell to 11-year-old Zhao and his mother. However, to make ends meet, his mother had to go work in a factory nearby in rural Hengshan county in Yulin prefecture as a seamstress stitching shoe inserts. Thus Zhao, standing barely four feet tall and only weighing about 60 pounds, rises at 4:00am each morning to water their crops and pull weeds before school starts.

Image

Zhao has been counting the days until he can see clearly

By the time Zhao sits down in class, he is simply exhausted. For a long time, he thought being tired and eating a meal a day were the main reasons behind his blurry vision. Now he knows there is another reason.

Before the OneSight Luxottica team came to his school, Zhao could barely read the blackboard even though he sat near the front of the classroom with the other shorter students. He had to wait until class was dismissed to walk up to the board and copy down his homework assignments. Other students—even those who sat at the very back of the classroom—did not seem to have the same problem. Was there something wrong with his vision?

Zhao was nervous when the Luxottica eye team visited, but they were polite and kind so he told them about his vision problems. Two weeks later, they returned and during an eye care training session, they confirmed that Zhao had myopia. This meant he could see objects up close, but objects farther away looked blurry. He was worried because he knew his parents did not have the money to buy him glasses.

He hopes the glasses will help him do better in school so he can get a good job to support his family.

Imagine the look on his face when the Luxottica team told him that they would return in another two weeks and give him a new pair of glasses custom fit for him…for free! Since then, Zhao has been counting the days until he can see. He hopes the glasses will help him do better in school so he can get a good job to support his family. “The glasses are like magic,” he says. “One minute I can’t see and the next, I can see everything—even a beetle in the courtyard! I can't wait!”