“I thought the board was meant to be blank”

Mitu is eleven and in Class 5 at a government primary school on the edge of a char, one of the sandbank islands that the Brahmaputra builds and takes away again. She has sat in the front row since she was seven, because she is small and because her teachers noticed early that she did better there. Nobody, including Mitu, knew why.

“I thought the board was meant to be blank,” she says. “Or that the teacher wrote very lightly. I copied from Shapla, next to me. She has nice handwriting.”

In March, Mitu’s school was one of 1,400 in the Rangpur Division where teachers were trained to run Mieru screening, as part of a grant to the Rangpur Rural Sight Society. Mr Abdul Halim, who has taught at the school for twenty-three years and teaches Mitu mathematics, spent two days learning to use the chart.

A chart without letters

The chart Mieru uses has no letters on it. Each row is a line of rings with a gap in them, getting smaller towards the bottom, and the child shows which way the gap faces by pointing: up, down, left or right. It is the chart used in every school in Japan, where the Foundation began, and it works for children who have not yet learned to read, or who read a different alphabet, or who are too shy to say a letter out loud and get it wrong in front of their friends.

“You stand them at five metres,” Mr Halim says. “You cover one eye with a card. They point. You go down until they stop being sure. It takes two minutes for each child, three if they are nervous.” He tested 176 children over four days. Twelve were referred to the eye clinic in Rangpur town. Mitu was one of them.

She pointed at the top ring and then she stopped. She said, sir, I can see that there are circles.

At the clinic an optometrist found that Mitu is very short-sighted in both eyes. With her right eye she could make out the top line of the chart at three metres; normal sight would read it at sixty. Her spectacles were made in a workshop in Rangpur run by technicians the programme trained in 2024, and were delivered to the school twenty-three days after her test, in a hard case with her name written inside the lid.

The back of the room

Mitu chose red frames. When she put them on, Mr Halim says, she looked at the board, then out of the window at the river, then at him, and then she asked to go and sit at the back.

“I wanted to see if it worked from there,” she says. It did. She has sat at the back ever since, next to Shapla, who now copies from her.

Her mother, who sells vegetables at the market in Kurigram town, says the change has been in more than lessons. Mitu used to walk home holding her older brother’s hand. She now walks on her own, and points things out to him across the river: herons, boats, a man fishing on the far bank whom he cannot see at all. Her mother has booked her own eye test.

What the follow-up found

Spectacles only work if children wear them, and in screening programmes everywhere many do not. Three months after delivery, Mieru staff visited a sample of the Rangpur schools unannounced. Of the children given spectacles, 63% were wearing them on the day, against 58% across the whole programme. The commonest reasons for not wearing them were breakage, teasing and being told by a relative that spectacles weaken the eyes, which they do not.

Mitu was wearing hers. The case, Mr Halim reports, has been decorated with stickers, and the lid now reads, in her handwriting, “Mitu. Do not touch.”

Mitu and her mother chose to share this story and approved the final text. We use her first name only, at her mother’s request.