Donate recycled printer cartridges to a worthy cause

My name is Pooja Nair and I am a senior at La Reina High School. My brother Sid, an eighth-grader at Chaminade, and I are doing a charity project to benefit the Sankara Eye Foundation. We were hoping to use the newspaper to encourage donations and volunteers. We are looking for donations of laser printer cartridges and volunteers to help collect and sort them.

We came up with the idea of recycling used ink cartridges to raise money for the Sankara Eye Foundation, a nonprofit organization that conducts eye surgeries for poor people in India.

We started this program toward the end of 2004, and that year we collected $78. In the first two months of 2005, we have collected just over $149 because of donations from Chaminade students.

In many third world countries, people are blind because they cannot afford the cost of a simple medical procedure such as cataract surgery, which costs $30. The organization performs surgeries entirely free for the patient and conducts 40,000 surgeries annually. For more information on Sankara Eye Foundation, please visit their website www.giftofvision.org.

To participate in the recycling program, please call Sid or me at (805) 529-5480.

Pooja Nair

Thousand Oaks