FINDING FOCUS, GAZING BEYOND
A US volunteer, who saw rural Chinese students struggle with sight, founded a nonprofit that is helping to find solutions in schools. Zhang Zefeng reports.
Andrew Shirman’s farsighted life vision has led him to focus on providing eyeglasses for impoverished Chinese children.
The American from an Illinois village decided as a teenager that success was measured by distance — that is, how far he could go from where he came, in every sense.
“A lot of the folks around me ended up not doing much,” Shirman recalls.
“I really wanted to see what I was made of and choose a different path.”
This way of looking at life led the Education in Sight founder to teach in Yunnan province’s impoverished Fengqing county through the nonprofit Teach For China after graduating from Boston College with a philosophy major. He taught middle school there for two years.
“It was the idea of pushing myself and seeing how far I could go, and how much difficulty I could endure,” the 30-year-old says. “It was meaningful and challenging work.”
Shirman was given a rustic room with a desk and bed in Pingcun Middle School.
He’d studied Chinese for five years before arriving but couldn’t communicate well with locals.
“For the first month, I was getting up at like 5 am every single day to prepare my lessons,” he says.
He prepared curriculums in English and then translated them into Chinese. He then practiced them out loud. Repeatedly.
Fast forward to 2018. Shirman has transformed from a young graduate into a social entrepreneur.
The nonprofit he founded in 2012, Education in Sight, offers glasses and eye care to rural students to improve their academic performance.
It has worked with 433 primary and middle schools in six cities, including Yunnan’s Shangri-La, to offer over 178,000 eye exams and about 25,300 sets of eyeglasses.
Students who live with poverty face many challenges.
Sometimes, schools would go days without electricity, so students did homework by candlelight.
Shirman soon found vision was a common problem among students. They’d constantly lean forward and squint at the blackboard or their classmates’ notes.
“They could not keep up in class because so much was going on,” he says.
“If you can’t keep up with that, you can’t keep up with education.”
Uncorrected vision is a preventable problem that’s especially present in rural China.
In a sample survey of Rural Education Action Program jointly launched by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shaanxi Normal University and Stanford University, it’s estimated only 10 percent of the 57 percent of China’s rural middle school students who are nearsighted wore glasses in 2013.
Li Zhongliang was among the best of Shirman’s first 47 students when he started teaching in Yunnan but fell behind over the semester because of nearsightedness.
“Imagine you’re in a classroom and you can’t see what’s on the board for 12 hours a day,” Shirman says.
“You get really bored, and you start misbehaving. It’s like being in a prison because you can’t leave either.”
Li was later labeled as a “problem student” and dropped out at age 13.
“I felt extremely frustrated. I felt like I completely failed him,” Shirman says.
“I knew what he needed. And I just didn’t organize myself enough to get help for him in time.”
Preventable problem
Vision issues can be easily diagnosed and corrected with glasses.
The main obstacles for students in remote areas to such basic services include awareness, accessibility and affordability.
Specialists who can give eye exams may be hours away.
“Spending a few hundred yuan on a pair of eyeglasses can be a major expense for the family,” says Deng Zhaohua, a teacher from Hetou Middle School, which is located around 30 kilometers from Yunnan’s Longling county.
“Even if students are aware they have vision problems, they still don’t get timely correction because of financial reasons.”
In 2012, Shirman worked with two other teachers to address the vision problems in his school. They invited a local optometrist to give eye exams. They found that a sixth of the 100 students needed glasses. But only six students had them.
Yang Fuxian was one of the students with vision problems. She was diagnosed with nearsightedness and received a pair of glasses from Education in Sight.
“The moment I put my glasses on, I knew I’m different from my peers, who don’t have vision problems. I need to take better care of my eyes,” the 21-year-old recalls.
Yang’s spectacles enabled her to fully engage in classes.
“Otherwise, I’d feel agitated and be reluctant to pay attention to the teachers.”
Most of her family’s income is spent on Yang’s and her two sisters’ educations.
She’s an accounting major at Yunnan University’s Dianchi College.
“The timely eye care I received helped me become a university student,” she says. “Without that, I might have become too bored and have had no desire to study.”
Uncorrected refractive errors are the leading cause of visual impairment worldwide and cause a loss of educational opportunities for at least 13 million children ages 5 to 15.
Adults, too, experience exclusion from productive working lives because of their inability to see well, the World Health Organization says.
Columbia University graduate Sam Waldo also got involved in the program in 2012.
He believes uncorrected visual impairments affect not only students’ grades but also their future employment. And their attitudes toward vision correction will also affect their children.
“People always talk about teaching someone how to fish versus giving them a fish,” Waldo says. “What we’re doing is more like giving someone a fish, but we also try to teach them how to fish. It’s a really small cost to pay for a multifaceted, lasting, long-term impact.”
Looking forward
Offering students eyeglasses is only a temporary solution to vision problems. The program must combine eye care with professional training and education to become more sustainable.
The team began working on the project full time from 2014. They started cooperating with a public hospital in Shangri-La a year later.
They’ve provided eye care for nearly 90,000 students in Yunnan’s Longling and Shidian counties, which are officially recognized as impoverished according to the national standard.
“About 17 percent of students with vision problems were offered eye examinations and free eyeglasses with their parents’ permission,” Education in Sight’s country director Yang Jin says. “We also work with teachers to educate students about vision problems.”
About a third of China’s 77 officially impoverished county hospitals have an ophthalmology department, Yang says.
So, the nonprofit collaborated with local health departments and hospitals to set up vision centers and train professional optometrists.
Longling People’s Hospital’s president Yang Jicheng says the hospital’s vision center has screened 127 schools and nearly 40,000 students in the past two years. Over 4,700 students were given free glasses during the period.
“This is a very innovative project that creates a ‘win-win-win’ situation among students, schools and hospitals,” he says.
It has significantly improved students’ academic performance, Longling education bureau official Yang Lizhi says.
The number of involved students who enroll in first-tier universities has increased from 6.8 percent in 2014 to nearly 11 percent, which is above county-level cities’ average.
Students’ performance on the high school entrance examination has also improved over the years.
“Student performance can be affected by multiple causes, including family and teachers,” Yang Lizhi says. “Our teachers think vision correction has a positive academic impact.”
Shirman believes Education in Sight is one of the forces shaping China’s young generation’s charitable mindset.
“China is only going to have more responsibility on a global stage,” he says.
“I think developing this mindset of giving and supporting people outside of your community is important. Such a mindset shift is occurring. But it needs people to support it. That’s part of what we’re doing.”