Donated glasses seized by customs
Under the auspices of Bali's Yayasan Kemanusiaan Indonesia (YKI)/John Fawcett Eye Foundation, a community drive was launched in October 2005 to collect unwanted, used eyeglasses from residents and visitors. Donated to the foundation, these cast-off glasses are repaired, gauged and given away (after proper assessment and doctor prescription) to needy Balinese men, women and children across the island.
As part of this campaign, hundreds of posters were distributed across the island and pleas were made to visitors to bring unwanted eyeglasses when they visit Bali. To date, the campaign has been a great success.
This month, two Australian visitors each arrived with more than 300 pairs of eyeglasses as donations. The visitor arriving on Dec. 13 cleared customs with no problem, simply by showing the campaign poster. On arrival on Dec. 14, with three boxes labeled with the same poster, a visitor had the donations confiscated for duty payment.
In the second case, the customs officer, who refused to give any identification further than Pak Wayan, would not provide any written regulation or calculation for importing these used items for donation. He claimed that duty on the donated glasses would have to be determined by his "boss" or by providing letters from three different government agencies to grant duty-free clearance. Clearly this is meant to intimidate a non-Indonesian speaking visitor into just "paying up".
Certainly, these glasses have no commercial value, as they are useless to any other than the intended recipients. If there is a regulation against importing such donations in such small quantities, perhaps it should be reviewed. And if there is not really an issue here, perhaps we can conclude that Pak Wayan was just fishing for some year-end pocket money.
To date, we have been unable to find assistance to get the glasses released. In fact, we have found more parallel stories -- even to the point that donations such as this were held at customs until the donor returned to Australia and had to take the goods back! Certainly embarrassing, inefficient, expensive and counter to the spirit of community assistance.
DEBE CAMPBELL, Public Relations Volunteer, YKI "I Can See Clearly", Community Campaign, Denpasar