Nepal’s God of Sight eye doctor to expand work beyond border

LUMBINI, Nepal (AP) — Just next to the Mayadevi temple where Buddha was born more than 2,600 years ago, hundreds of people lined up outside a makeshift hospital on a recent hazy day, hoping their fading eyesight could be restored.

A day later, these saffron-robed Buddhist monks, old farmers and housewives were able to see the world again because the nation's renowned eye surgeon Dr. Sanduk Ruit was there with his innovative and inexpensive cataract surgery that has earned him many awards.

At the visitor center turned into eye temporary hospital in Lumbini, located 288 kilometers (180 miles) south west of Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, the assembly line surgery made it possible for the nearly 400 patients to get Ruit's surgery in just three days.

“The whole objective, aim and my passion and love is to see there remain no people with unnecessary blindness in this part of the world," Ruit said, also known as Nepal’s “God of Sight.” “It is important that the people do receive equitable service and not that haves receive and have nots don’t receive it. I want to make sure that everybody receives it."

Many people in Nepal, most of them poor, have benefited from Ruit's work where he founded the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Kathmandu and regularly visits remote villages high in the mountains and low lands of the Himalayan nation, taking with him a team of experts and equipment bringing surgery to their villages.

Ruit has already performed some 130,000 cataract surgeries and is now aiming to expand his work, taking it to as many countries as possible through a foundation he has formed with a British philanthropist Tej Kohli which targets 500,000 surgeries in the next five years.

Ruit said the idea of the Tej Kohli Ruit Foundation is to make cataract...