It was 4pm on a slow Sunday when I received a message to inquire about glasses donation. “Hi Tai, is your company involved in any charity?” “Yes.” “We have an eye screening project around KL and Selangor area, and we are looking for an optical shop as our partner. Are you interested?”

That’s how we got started to work together on the eye care program for underprivileged schools.

The Eye Care Program in Malaysia

The name of program is “I Can See Clearly Now“, a Magnum staff-initiated project. The team we engaged with a team called Magnum 3-in-1, lead by Mr Cheng from the I.T department. There are four schools altogether to join the program namely SJK(C) Pui Chi,  SJK(C) Tanjong Karang, SJK(C) Pui Teh and SK Methodist Port Klang. Cheng and Team would first research on the schools that need the support. Upon getting the schools on board, they would come up with creative idea to raise fund to support the program. Some of the activities they did include selling freshly roasted almonds, cashews, peanuts, walnuts, hazelnuts and cranberries.

Fast forward to 30th March where we carried our first program. We arrived at SJKC Pui Chi at 8:30am. After having a quick breakfast, we started to do eye check for the primary school students. I have to say that they are so charming that they remind us a lot about our younger days. We had done a lot of eye care program and glasses donation to various schools, but this was the first Chinese vernacular school to have this program by us. It’s definitely reminiscing to visit the school to most of us as we studied in SJKC before.

After we had completed doing screening for 60 over students, we went to SJKC Pui Teh which is 15 mins drive away. As we had gained momentum from the previous screening, we took even shorter time to perform eye test to another 40 students. We were able to complete all the eye test without causing much interruption to schools.

2 weeks later, we went to SK Methodist at Port Klang. This possessed huge challenge as we needed to do screening for over 900 students. Thankfully with the help from Cheng and Team, we were able to cover more than half on the first day. By 3pm the next day, we were able to complete the eye test.

A heart full of gratitude.

When we first started the glasses donation program, we have never thought that it’d lead to where we are today. We’ve never imagined that other organisations would recognise our effort in helping the society and even wanted to work together with us. The fact that we have been helping more than 1000 underprivileged ones is definitely very fulfilling and rewarding! We look forward to more glasses donation and eye care program this year! For more information about the program, you can look up this link. If you’d like to join the program, feel free to drop us an email at [email protected].