St Johns receives aid from overseas donors

 By SHARLYNE ERI 
The St John Blind Centre in Port Moresby received 400 pairs of prescription glasses and three laptops from donors in Australia this week.
Cath Porter from Twivey Lawyers was excited to present the donations and thanked Brisbane Connect, Palm Lake and many of her friends and family in Australia who contributed.
“I recently put out a call on Facebook for prescription glasses to be donated to St Johns for the Blind,” Porter said.
“The response was beyond my control. I received in excess of 500 pairs of glasses.
“This was absolutely amazing as we were only looking for a couple of hundreds.”
Porter put together a package of 400 pairs to be donated to St John Blind Centre and the rest will be given to inmates in Bomana.
Porter also put a call out for used laptops and educational material and received three laptops from IPM Global, a software company in Brisbane.
She said that the laptops would be loaded with  software from NVAccess.com which could  convert voice to text and text to voice, making them useful tools for educating people living with disability. Learning is made easier and fun for them.
Porter said she was in the process of arranging for the shipment of more donations from Australia.