A A Canadian couple decided to travel around the world with their four children before three of them, suffering from a rare genetic disease, were blinded.

A 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.

So far, they have visited countries like Zambia, Tanzania, Turkey and Mongolia, where they stayed for over 30 days and left on the 31st 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 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.

During this time, they perform trails and tours across Canada.

In an interview with “CTV News”, the couple Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletier said 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 degenerative inherited condition that usually begins to manifest in childhood, resulting in vision loss or decline over time.

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 vision of the three children is likely to accelerate in adolescence.

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

It was then that they had the idea of ​​making this trip around the world.

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 freshwater pools in the sea in Tanzania, enjoying mountainside pools in Turkey and Gobi sleeping under starry skies without the city ​​lights.

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.