The Gift of Sight for a Scholar

By Ronia Romero | April 14, 2022

Those of you who read our companion blog, Letters from the President, will know about our new urgent needs program. Today, we’d love to tell you about the impact of that new program on a young girl in our scholarship program named Yenna.

Yenna lives with her mother, two sisters, and brother in a one-room apartment just outside the garbage dump in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Yenna is a very sweet girl who’s very excited because she recently began fourth grade. She loves school, spending time with her friends, and she especially loves the reading club that she’s part of with the other IntSam scholars. Yenna loves reading, but she has struggled with very severe near-sightedness for many years.

Yenna’s family hasn’t had the means to get Yenna help for her vision. Her  father left many years ago and offers no support for the family. Yenna’s mother supports her four children by working at the local school as a janitor, but the pandemic has made her job very difficult. Because  children were not attending school in person, the students’ parents refused to pay the cleaning fee, which meant that the school couldn’t cover Yenna’s mother’s entire salary. Yenna’s mother agreed to work for half of her salary so she wouldn’t be left jobless, but when that wasn’t enough to care for her children, she also started to work in the nearby dump and sell recycled materials to cover household expenses. Yenna’s mother has known that her daughter has desperately needed glasses for years, but it simply hasn’t been possible – until now.

Thanks to the support of donors like you, Yenna was able to see an optometrist.  The optometrist repeated many times that, had we not come in, Yenna’s vision would have continued to deteriorate until the only solution likely would have been surgery. We are thrilled that Yenna now has glasses and is able to see normally for the first time. When asked what she thought of her glasses, Yenna shared, “When I put on my glasses, I was so happy that I began to cry.”

Yenna, her mother, and all of our team in Tegucigalpa would like to thank you for making moments like this possible. Have a wonderful Easter!