Return from world trip

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33215, 3 May 1973, Page 2

Return from world trip

Miss Lia Van Lent, the Christchurch girl who recovered her sight after being blind for eight years, was sleeping soundly at her home in Christchurch last night after flying back from a three-month holiday overseas.

She is shown above at Auckland Airport on her arrival in New Zealand yesterday afternoon. Miss Van Lent’s round-the-world trip was arranged by an Amsterdam newspaper which received many contributions when the story of her cure was published. She described the trip as “a wonderful chance to see people whose voices were all I knew before.” The most important stop was in the Netherlands, her birthplace, where Miss Van Lent saw her grandmother! and many friends.

But she would not like to return to the Netherlands to live, she said when she arrived in Auckland yesterday. “People there were like sardines in a tin. It is altogether too crowded.”

In the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States Miss Van Lent gave lectures on the cure that restored her eyesight “overnight.” Blind in one eye at birth, 25-year-old Miss Van Lent lost the sight in the other eye after an accident when she was 17. She had been treated by a Christchurch eye specialist since the accident. Yesterday she said she did not have definite plans for the future. “I do not know what I will be doing. I will need time to think about it,” she said.