However, the rich culture was not the only thing Sam noticed. While he was racking his brains to help local students understand English vocabulary and grammar, he realized that some of the students sitting in the back of the classroom were just not performing well.
"You can see them like squinting and really trying to get the information on the blackboard but they just couldn't. Or they were not copying notes when they should be. So we realize that these kids just could't see," Sam said.
Sam and other volunteers had tried to make more photocopies of notes and let the students move to the front of the classroom, but they knew it was not a long-term solution. That was when the idea of glasses donation came up.
They started the donation at three schools in the local village. With money raised from friends and families, they donated 331 pairs of glasses in the first year.
Then, to build up a donor pipeline in order to make their goal more sustainable, Sam and his friends decided to found a social enterprise in 2015. By selling sunglasses in big cities, they raise money for tests of vision, and give Yunnan students access to glasses.
So far, the team has done 180,000 vision screening exams at 337 schools and donated over 19,000 pairs of glasses in Yunnan. In the local village of Yunnan, six out of eight students Sam once taught were wearing the donated glasses, and were later enrolled in the best high school in the county.
"Look how happy they were!" Sam said, smiling at a photo of teenagers he once taught in Shangri-La.
To build a connection between more developed and modernized cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and rural communities, as well as to enhance communications between the Chinese and the Americans, Sam hopes that more and more people can participate in this charity program.
For Sam and his team, there is still a lot of work to do. "We have estimated that 13 million students in rural China need corrective vision but don't have access to it," he said.
Luckily, his team has been expanding ever since its establishment.
Apart from other volunteering foreigners, energetic young people from Beijing, Hong Kong and other places across China are also making efforts to upgrade the donations.
