About Merida Foundation
The Merida Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable corporation originally founded and funded by Dorothy and Rudy Lemke in December 2003 to benefit the descendants of the ancient Mayan people of Mexican’s Yucatan Peninsula. Since 1970’s, now retired optician, Dorothy Lemke has been providing eyeglasses to the poor, visually impaired people in the rural villages surrounding the city of Merida.
The Merida Foundation makes 2 or 3 trips to Merida every year, there is always at least one board member on each visit as well as other contributors to the foundation who want to help distribute glasses and see the nutrition sites. We distribute 900 to 1,200 pairs of glasses each trip to people in the villages surrounding Merida. We travel to villages within an approximately 50-mile radius of Merida.
Since its inception, the Merida Foundation has also funded nutrition projects for undernourished school children in the region. Today, the foundation is feeding approximately 700 hungry children one nutritious meal each school day at nine nutrition sites.
“The feeling when you get to help to improve the life quality of some person that need it, you can feel part of their joy in that moment and it is a true pleasure….I am learning every action has a consequence. In this case, we could improve a little the quality of life of these people. So I think it was and always will be an amazing feeling and experience.”
– Sandro, Volunteer (brother to Genny)
Genny, Luis, and Sandro helping disperse glasses at various sites in the region.
Photo: Dorothy, the mayor of Tahmek and Rudy
Our Board of Directors
President – Mark Saucier
Vice-President – Anne Durbin Scott
Treasurer – Larry Lewis
Secretary – Greg Mihalevich
Member – Patricia Joyce
Director Emeritus – Dorothy Lemke
Director Emeritus – Rudy Lemke
Interested in learning more about Merida Foundation or have resources you would like to share? Please feel free contact us: info@meridafoundation.org
Our Founders
In 2011 Dorothy was honored to receive the Mrs. William H. Weldon Lifetime Achievement Award from Zonta Club of Jefferson City, Missouri for her work in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
Optician Dorothy Lemke first visited Merida in the spring of 1982 when she accompanied her husband to Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula so he could pursue his interest in Mayan culture and archaeology. Dorothy wasn’t very interested in either and one day as she was wandering around a village she noticed a man that was sitting in the shade on the side of the street, head down on his knees which he held to his chest. “What a lazy bum,” she thought to herself “why isn’t he at work?” Just then he raised his head and she saw that he was blind. Her evaluation of him instantly went from that of distain to one of pity. This encounter continued to haunt her after she returned home. She was in the business of helping people see better, surely there was something she could do to help the poor Mexican villagers.
Dorothy’s upbringing taught her never to waste anything, so she had a box of 169 pairs of used eye glasses that her clients left at her office when they got a new prescription. On her next trip to Mexico those glasses went with her and while her husband was at the Mayan ruins Dorothy was in the village fitting folks with a free pair of glasses. “After I ran out of glasses there was still a mass of people looking sadly back at me.” she said. “I still can’t forget that look. It just intensified this burning inside of me.”
Every year for the next 40-plus years Dorothy has taken eye glasses to the people in the villages surrounding Merida, often making two or three trips in a year. Each time she provides a free gift of improved vision to 1,000 or so people in need.
Dorothy has touched and changed thousands of lives in the Yucatan Peninsula. Today Dorothy still brings sight to the poor and impoverished. Well done “glasses lady” as she is known in the Villages – Well done.
Help us continue Dorothy’s example and support the wonderful people of the state of Yucatan, Mexico, where many of the indigenous Mayan families exist on less than $2.00 a day, making it difficult to provide daily nutritious meals for their children, let alone eye glasses when their sight begins to fail.