The city where I went to teach as a volunteer is called Lin Cang.
Roughly 7-8 hours by bus from Kunming (the capital city of Yunnan).
The town where I stayed at is called Yong Bao.
So two more hours from Lin Cang to Yun Xian.
And another 2.5 hours to Yong Bao.
So it is a quite remote place.
My name is Sam.
My Chinese name is Wei Wenjie.
28 years old.
6 years in China so far.
After graduation from college, I was intrigued by everything in China.
So I went to the rural villages in China and taught there for 2 year as volunteer.
I taught at elementary schools and high schools.
What really surprised me is that
A lot of school kids have poor eye sight.
When they go for a vision examination,
they can barely read anything from the chart, not even the largest letter on the top.
In statistics, there are 30 million students in rural China who are suffering from impaired or weak vision.
In estimate, there are roughly 800 thousand students in need of eye classes in Yunnan province alone.
But they don't have any financial resources, or do not have the concept to get a pair of eye classes for themselves.
In Yongbao, I was the first foreigner that the local people have ever seen.
especially for my students
They have never ever seen people like me. So they are quite curious what is my mission to be here.
Although they love their hometown, but they still think I deserve a better place to make more money.
It is a very special experience to visit their homes.
How can I describe it?
It is just like I left this world and entered another.
In the beginning, my alumni John and our buddy Andrew,
Along with other teachers, we realized that a lot of kids have severe vision challenges.
For each class, I will ask them to take their textbooks and move to the front to take notes.
So that they can have opportunities to learn from the notes that they take in class.
Otherwise, they cannot see anything on the blackboard,
from their own seats.
Or they might not understand their textbooks by looking at it.
How is possible for the kids to learn anything?
Then how can the teacher communicate well with the students?
The kids must be scolded all the time.
For being stupid or things like that.
This really upsets me.
We talked to those parents and asked them if they are aware that their kids are near-sighted.
Some of them replied that they have a vague idea about this.
That in that impression, their kids have some eye issues.
But they don't know what to do.
According to a study by Stanford University,
If we give each child with vision issues a pair of eye glasses,
They are likely to achieve much greater than their parents.
Or can create a greater wealth than their current family income.
So we decided to produce eye glasses for students with near-sighted vision.
Our target is
There should be no kids who lose their opportunities for education due to poor vision.
In the winter of 2014,
It is the first time for us to draft a model combining business interest and social welfare.
We designed and created our very first pair of sunglasses.
For each pair of sunglasses sold, we will donate a pair of eye glasses
To the kids in the rural mountains in Yunnan who have vision issues.
So if you purchase a pair of sunglasses,
it does not solely mean that you are fashionable or looking cool,
At the same time, it means that you have consciousness of the social issues.
We were not rich at all when we started it.
Virtually, we were a bunch of street vendors.
Hoping that they will listen to our stories.
We have been to a lot of flagship stores with international fame.
Of course, we were driven off.
But it doesn't matter.
It is fine if they kicked us out of there.
Slowly we learned our lessons from our experience. We came to know
What places are safe and popular
It'd be great if we can let them linger for 10 seconds.
So that we can share our stories with them within these 10 seconds.
Of course, this interaction does not guarantee a good sale all the time.
Still, it makes us happy and feel great.
Because when other people can hear about these stories,
In general, they give us a lot supportive comments.
We have already conducted 110, 000 vision examinations for school kids.
And donated 16,000 pairs of eye glasses in Yunnan.
It seems that Chinese people are particularly supportive to us as foreigner volunteers.
They all believe that it is of much greater difficulty for foreigners to do things like this in China.
Or why do it here, not in USA?
Especially after I stayed in Yunnan for so many years.
I am well acquainted with local people from there.
I don't feel the distance between me and people there.