The El Salvador program initiative of the Bellingham Central Lions Club

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OUR EL SALVADOR INITIATIVE

Beginnings. As so often the case among Lions, our El Salvador Initiative began with the commitment of one Lion, Dr. Ken Henderson. Ken is an optometrist. In 2002, he was recruited to by the PeaceHealth El Salvator project to participate in their health clinics in El Salvador. Peacehealth does not have optometrists in their system and Lion Ken was asked to organize the "eye team" for the missions and has done so each year since. This volunteer work brought him into contact with a variety of care providers and institutions in El Salvador. Everywhere he looked, Ken saw opportunities to help where the need was enormous - problems of just the sort that Lions are adept at solving.

So Ken went to work building bridges and herding "cats" - a noun used to describe Lions in a less-than-organized condition. He recruited Lions from Bellingham Central, Lions from other clubs in District 19-H, indeed, Lions from all over our Multiple District. And he also built the necessary bridges to the Lions from District D-2 in El Salvador, finding out what was already being done and how we might help.

The next step was to get all these Lions working together. To this end, Ken organized a working delegation of 17 Lions drawn from five clubs in Washington and British Columbia. In 2007, this delegation brought wheelchairs, walkers, glasses, medications, hearing aids and specialized low vision testing equipment to aid in the projects of the Lions of El Salvador.
Here we see some of the equipment and supplies destined for the School for the Deaf in the city of San Salvador.

While in El Salvador, the delegates participated in an Eye Clinic organized by the Mexijanos Lions Club, which owns a physical clinic from which it provides a variety of medical and social services. However, there is no way, while in El Salvador, of producing anything like the number of glasses necessary to meet the local need. This is where our Lions club enters the picture. Lions in Washington gather prescription eyeglasses specifically to recycle through clinics in places where the need is great. So we brought down about 2,000 pairs of glasses to distribute through the Mexijanos Lions Club Clinic, which is pictured here in progress.

The Bellingham Central Lions Club has also twinned with the San Salvador Lions Club, in the ceremony seen here. Twinning is the process by which Lions Clubs in different countries join together in order to carryout a program or project together. In this case, our two clubs will be organizing eye clinics and working with local programs for the blind and deaf.