THE the search for “visual memories” began in March this year and is expected to last a year. The first destination was Namibia in South West Africa.

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So far, they have already visited countries like Zambia, Tanzania, Turkey and Mongolia, where they stayed for more than 30 days and left on the 31st to head for the beaches of Indonesia.

The family’s journey is shared through social networks on the account “The world full their eyes” (the world fills your eyes, in Portuguese).

In the posts made on Instagram, they say that the start of the trip around the world was planned for 2020. However, the plans had to be postponed due to the pandemic.

In the meantime, they have organized trails and tours across Canada.

In an interview with “CTV News”, the couple Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletier tell that their eldest daughter, Mia, began to have vision problems at the age of 3 years.

Years later, she, now 12, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosaa a degenerative inherited condition that usually begins to show in childhood, causing vision loss or decline over time.

“There’s nothing you can really do. We don’t know how fast it’s going to happen, but hopefully they’ll go completely blind in middle age,” Edith said in the interview.

Two of the couple’s other children, Colin and Laurent, also showed similar symptoms. In 2019, it was confirmed that the brothers, who are now 7 and 5, also had the genetic problem. The eldest son, Leo, 9, has not been diagnosed with the disease.

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

After the diagnosis, the couple sought out a specialist, who guided them to improve the “visual memories” of the children.

“I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to show him an elephant in a book, I’m going to take him to see a real elephant and I’m going to fill his visual memory with the best and most beautiful images that I can.'” , said the mother.

That’s when they had the idea to do it while traveling the world.

“Especially big and wide spaces, because that’s something they will miss,” Lemay told CTV News.

Recordings shared on social media, usually made by the mother, show that so far the plan is working and in Zambia they have managed to observe an elephant for 30 seconds.

Photos and videos show children scaling the surface of huge boulders in Namibia, playing in the sea in freshwater pools in Tanzania, enjoying mountainside pools in Turkey and Gobi sleeping under starry skies without the city ​​lights.

Retinitis pigmentosa results in a progressive degeneration of photoreceptors, cells in the eye that transform light into nerve impulses, then processed by the retina and sent to the brain by nerve fibers.

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

But while the disease destroys the rods, the cones survive in the body, even after blindness.