7 great quotes from the God of Sight: Dr Sanduk Ruit

In 1985, while Fred Hollows was working on an evaluation of Nepal's blindness prevention program for the World Health Organization, Dr Sanduk Ruit met Fred and the pair quickly became close friends. They bonded over their mutual desire for a world where no one was needlessly blind.  

Shortly after their meeting, Fred invited Dr Ruit to Australia to observe modern cataract surgery techniques and the Nepalese surgeon worked alongside Fred at the Prince of Wales Hospital.

During this time, Fred and Dr Ruit became determined to make modern cataract surgery with intraocular lenses (IOLs) accessible in Nepal where the technique had been to remove the diseased lens and simply give patients thick glasses.  

"We were considered outlaws" after putting the idea into practice in 1989, Dr Ruit describes.

Despite that, Dr Ruit continued his work through eye surgery camps across remote Nepal with a team he dubbed 'The Magnificent Seven'.

But Dr Ruit and Fred's dream of establishing modern cataract surgery in Nepal was threatened by the high cost of IOLs.

The answer they came up with was to build an IOL factory in Nepal that could produce large quantities of lenses at affordable prices for lower socioeconomic countries.

That factory was established in 1995 and is now self-funded and locally managed, and producing high-quality, affordable IOLs for use across some 75 countries.

Meanwhile, in Nepal, Dr Ruit was restoring sight to thousands of people in remote camps and establishing a reputation that would see him perform cataract surgery on the Prime Minister of Nepal – the first time a Nepalese VIP had undergone surgery of any kind in their own country.

Overall, it's said that Dr Ruit has performed more than 120,000 cataract surgeries and he's become known as 'the God of Sight' in his home country.

He also established the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology, which works in all areas of eye care and has an enduring partnership with The Fred Hollows Foundation.

It's been a remarkable journey, with more to come, and here are some of Dr Ruit's most notable quotes about that journey...

"Putting in lenses for cataract surgery was not something you could do for people in the developing world - they (the establishment) thought it was too expensive, too complicated - as if our eyes are different!"

 

 

 

• What about the ones who can't afford it?

"What about all the people who can't even get to a hospital? The ones who can't afford the bus fare, or who can't read or write, and don't even know that help is available and that they can get their eyes fixed?

"We need to think about them as well. We have a duty to look after them as well. And, if they can't get to us, we need to get to them."

 

Photo: Dr Ruit with patients from an eye camp in Ladakh in 2016 / Michael Amendolia 

 

 

• We're trying to educate
   

"There's a saying in many villages: 'first your hair goes white, then your eyes go white, then you die'. It's a fatalistic acceptance of blindness we're still trying to educate a lot of villagers about."

 

Photo: Dr Ruit with Fred Hollows in Nepal in 1992 / Jonathan Chester/Extreme Images

 

 

• What are they doing?

"We were doing sophisticated surgery in the bush and that was making the big five-star surgeons uneasy. They thought 'what are these bastards doing?'

"There were a lot of people threatened by what we were doing."