DEVIZES optician Tony Nixon leaves next week to lead a five-strong team of fellow eye specialists to Ghana where they will spend two weeks holding clinics and testing the eyes of thousands of Africans.

Mr Nixon and his team are travelling under the auspices of the charity Vision Aid Overseas, and will be dispensing 2,000 secondhand pairs of spectacles donated by local people.

Mr Nixon, a partner in Nixon and Shaw of Monday Market Street, said: "Most people in Africa are too poor to be able to afford proper eye care. Although we expect to see some unusual eye diseases that most opticians in this country have no experience of, most people we will treat can be sorted out with a pair of spectacles."

This trip will be the 100th carried out by Vision Aid in the last 17 years.

It is the third trip for Mr Nixon who went to The Gambia in 1995 and Malawi in 1997.

For him this visit will be particularly poignant.

It is his first trip away from Wiltshire since the death of his wife Stephanie earlier this year following a long illness.