The Chepang Vision Care Project.

We are the passionate health professionals bonded as a non-profit, non-government organization called Better Vision Foundation-Nepal, with a common mission of making Nepal free of avoidable blindness, mainly refractive errors. Established in late 2017 and completed all the legal procedures of registration, we have already undertaken 3 comprehensive eye screening of schoolchildren and 3 general eye camps.

Where does the Chepang project come from?

We have set two plans to reach to our goals in regard to the time frame: 1) Short-term: charitable work focused to the community mainly underprivileged and marginalized population, children and the elderly 2) Long-term: facility for complete vision care in key areas of country. We aim to establish systematic approach for community eye screening and as a one-off charitable endeavor we are going to conduct a comprehensive eye and vision screening of a highly marginalized and the most disadvantaged indigenous ethnic group of Nepal: The Chepang.

Who are the Chepangs?

These are the indigenous Tibeto-Burman people with a semi-nomadic lifestyle that constitute 0.23% of Nepal’s population (52000). Thirty percent of them live in Makwanpur. They are underrepresented population in social and political sphere with extremely low literacy rate (>75% illiterates). They also poise livelihood challenges with the food shortages, hygiene issues and lack of land ownership.

While we made a visit to one of their abodes, we were deeply moved by their situation, once again. We were quite happy in knowing that the wrenching six hours drive from Kathmandu was going to pay off. This was the first place in the whole earth that we would be carrying our first one-off charitable eye camp.

What $11K can do?

Here are volunteers waiting to serve. There are needy people there. $11K could be a means to take all those volunteers to the campsite, conduct eye screening and awareness campaign for 6 days, and bring those volunteers back. Besides, this very amount also buys complete eye care packages for the camp participants: drugs, glasses, and possibly surgeries. Therefore, $11K will bring about meaningful change to the lives of underserved 3,000.

This is a dream we dreamt about for long to make a difference to the life of Chepang people. Would not you like to make this dream more realistic? Remember: in every five dollar, a Chepang kid is getting a pair of prescription glasses in his hand in some other part of the world (Nepal).

Hence, $11K is the pathway that makes our dream come true.

If you want to make a difference to those in need by volunteering in this project please feel free to email:

bvfnepal@gmail.com

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Finally, we accomplished the Mission!

Watch the video report of our Chepang Vision Care Mission here: