Published in READERS DIGEST, Asia's largest selling monthly magazine

Miracles by the Thousands

Dr Sanduk Ruit has restored the eyesight of many of Asia's poorest people, rescuing them from a lifetime of misery 

Ram Shrestha is a heavily built man with a weather-beaten face and a scraggly moustache. But as he lies under green sterile drapes on an operating table in Kathmandu's Tilganga Eye Center, all I can see of him is his right eye. Painted with a brownish yellow disinfectant and illuminated by a small spotlight, it stares sightlessly at the ceiling.

For several years, Shrestha has been afflicted by cataracts, a disease that clouds the eye's lens, progressively dimming vision. Eight months ago the 54-year-old Nepali farmer went completely blind and could no longer work his land.

Peering through an operating microscope, surgical instruments in his gloved hands, Dr Sanduk Ruit makes a small incision in the side of Shrestha's eye. Going in deeper, he reaches the diseased lens and gently teases it out. As the milky blob slithers down Shrestha's cheek, Ruit then inserts a similarly sized clear plastic-like lens in its place. Five minutes is all it has taken.

Shrestha's eye is bandaged and he sits to one side while Ruit starts operating on another cataract patient. Ruit then repeats the procedure on Shrestha's left eye.

Tomorrow morning Shrestha will return to have his bandages removed, and discover if Ruit has successfully performed another small miracle.

In the last 23 years, Dr Sanduk Ruit has personally conducted nearly 70,000 cataract surgeries, often saving more than 100 people a day from blindness. And by developing simpler and cheaper...

To access the complete story, you have to be a registered member of RDAsia website.