A Canadian family travels the world in search of ‘visual memories’ before children go blind | Travel and Tourism

The The search for “Visual Memories” began in March of this year, and is supposed to last for a year. It was the first destination Namibia in southwest Africa.

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So far they have visited countries like ZambiaTanzania turkey And the Mongoliaa place where they stayed for more than 30 days and left on the 31st to go to the beaches Indonesia.

The family trip is shared via social networks on the account “Le monde plein leurs yeux” (The world fills your eyes in Portuguese).

In posts on Instagram, they said that the start of the round-the-world trip was scheduled for 2020. However, the plans were postponed due to the pandemic.

In the meantime, they have carried out itineraries and tours through Canada.

In an interview with CTV News, married couple Edith LeMay and Sebastien Pelletier said their eldest daughter Mia started having vision problems at the age of three.

Years later, she was diagnosed, and she is now 12 years old retinitis pigmentosaOne An inherited degenerative condition that usually begins in childhood, resulting in vision loss or deterioration over time.

“There’s really nothing you can do,” Edith said in the interview. “We don’t know how quickly this will happen, but we hope they’ll go completely blind by middle age.”

Two of the couple’s other children, Coleen and Laurent, also showed similar symptoms. In 2019, it was confirmed that the brothers, who are now 7 and 5 years old, also have a genetic problem. The eldest son, 9-year-old Leo, has not been diagnosed.

According to the family, there is currently no treatment or treatment to slow the progression of the disease and the three children’s vision deterioration is likely to accelerate in their adolescence.

After the diagnosis, the couple hired a specialist who directed them to reinforce the children’s “visual memories.”

“I thought, ‘I’m not going to show her an elephant in a book, I’m going to take her to see a real elephant and I’ll fill her visual memory with the best and most beautiful pictures I can,'” said the mother.

That’s when they got the idea to do this by traveling around the world.

“The large and spacious spaces especially, because that’s something they will miss,” LeMay told CTV News.

Records shared on social media, which are usually made by the mother, show that the plan is working so far.

Pictures and videos show children climbing the surface of huge boulders in Namibia, playing in the sea in freshwater ponds in Tanzania, enjoying the rolling mountain pools of Turkey, and in the Gobi sleeping under a starry sky without daylight. City.

The Retinitis pigmentosa translates into a gradual degeneration of the photoreceptorseye cells that convert light into nerve impulses, which are then processed by the retina and sent to the brain by nerve fibers.

The disease causes, first, the degeneration of the photoreceptors responsible for night vision – cells known as rods – and then those responsible for daytime vision – the cones.

But while the disease destroys the canes, the cones remain in the body, even after blindness.