Sunshine Durham

When I was five my brother and I spent the summer in Wyoming at my grandmother’s cabin and a terrible accident happened. Jory and I were on the front porch playing a silly game, which entailed putting dirt on the porch and then sweeping it off with an old broom. I wanted a turn at sweeping so I tried to take the broom away from my brother. We moved into a tug-of-war over the old broom and it broke apart into two pieces. A small section of the broken broom flew directly into my left eye, puncturing it and blinding me instantly.

Over the next year and a half, we would see dozens of specialists and go through too many surgeries to keep count. My mom and I were spending a few days a week with our prosthetic eye doctor and we began to notice that there were many other families that had children with eye injuries in need of the same treatment I was receiving. It was sad to see so many children being turned away because they couldn’t afford the treatment.

We decided to start a little company called Sunshine’s Scarves and each scarf would have a hangtag on it, describing the need for prosthetic eye care for children and we would donate 50% of the profit to The Sunshine Foundation, a non-profit children’s charity that provides financial assistance and medical treatment programs to families with a child requiring a prosthetic eye. This was a monumental moment for us both, because all during the time I had lost my eye, my mom kept telling me that their was a purpose in this accident happening, she said we would have to be patient and wait for life to unfold the answer when the time was right.