Quebec family travelling the world before children lose eyesight

“Live in the moment and think about the future when we get there,” said Quebec mother of four Edith Lemay.

Lemay, her husband Sebastien Pelletier and their children set off to travel the world for a year to capture visual memories before the children lose their eyesight.

“A [specialist was telling me to] show them elephants and giraffes in books, and that’s when we came up with the idea,” Lemay explained. “Might as well go see them, the real thing.”

It all started with their eldest Mia, they noticed she would walk into walls and furniture at night as if she could not see in the dark. After consulting with a specialist and undergoing genetic testing, the result was shocking.

It was retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that makes cells in the retina break down causing eventual vision loss.

Quebec family travelling the world before children lose eyesight. (Photos courtesy: Lemay-Pelletier family)

“It [was] disbelief, this can’t be happening,” said Pelletier.

“The hardest part was not being able to do something [about it],” added Lemay.

Their two youngest boys Colin and Laurent received the same prognosis. The eldest son Leo has yet to present any symptoms of the disease. Despite all of their children being younger than 10, the parents decided it was best to tell them before they got older.

“I told her and her reaction was something like, ‘oh, too bad’, but was the extent of her reaction,” said Lemay.

“As a child, we’re better off not to raise them [feeling like] victims, but [instead] that it’s part of them,” said Pelletier. “They’re going to find solutions and live with it, and they’re going to make the best of it.”

The plan was years in the making, originally the family was supposed to leave in July of 2020, but the pandemic hit and the invasion of Ukraine later occurred.

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It forced them to re-route and start with Africa. The family is now in Namibia where they plan to stay for a month, cross the continent and end up in Mongolia or Turkey.

“It took a pandemic, a war, everything for us to be here but here we are,” said Lemay.

“When things like that happen and when life pushes you in a direction that you didn’t expect to go, most of the time you’re in the right direction. The travel we’ve been doing for the last two weeks, I can’t imagine a better place to start our trip in. It’s so beautiful.”

The family will be documenting their journey on their Facebook page “Le Monde Plein Leurs Yeux” while country-hopping and a lot of homeschooling.