A STEPPED-up appeal for support has followed the first visit of a team of opticians to Romania in memory of Sarah Hampton who was a director in her family's practice in Bromsgrove.

Organisers of the foundation set up in her memory returned at the weekend with harrowing tales of suffering among abandoned children in state orphanages and hospitals.

The venture has been named the "Sunshine Appeal" because of the sunny and friendly nature of the young woman who lost her life.

The foundation sent a team of six to carry out desperately needed eye tests and to supply spectacles to 200 people. A charity orphanage was used as a base.

In November it plans to make more progress towards setting up a permanent eye clinic. Equipment will include £12,000 worth of the latest optical testing equipment.

But members of the team, including Sarah's parents Mike and Barbara Hampton, were so touched by what they saw on their first visit they plan a "gift box" appeal alongside requests for continuing financial support.

The five-day work session took place at Caminul Felix in Romania, a "rescue" orphanage set up by an American couple six years ago and backed by the Amblecote Christian Centre of Stourbridge.

A spokesman for the orphanage said of the foundation's first visit: "There is now the beginning of work that will reach out and touch thousands of disadvantaged children in Transylvania".

Ian Robinson, a friend and colleague in Hamptons the Opticians, said the foundation wanted to do all it could to relieve the suffering and deprivation the team had witnessed.

The orphanage was doing "wonderful work" with children abandoned and seriously neglected in state institutions.

But of the Romanian society outside he said: "There is such poverty parents sometime scald the arms of their children to make them more appealing as beggars.

"They lack so much we just take for granted here. There is a desperate need for items like soap, detergent, toys, sugar, cooking oil, bags of rice and dried milk. We want to send as much as we can."

He said the foundation hoped people would prepare gift boxes which the team would send with Caminul Felix shipments from next month.