
Cataract Chronicles-25 years
As I celebrate my 25th year volunteering as an eye surgeon in Southeast Asia. I am delighted to share photos and stories about the vision challenges and the people and cultures of India, Nepal, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. - Dr. Gary Barth
Chronicle 28 - These Three Sets of Hands Have Performed 250,000 cataract surgeries

I have been unbelievably lucky to work with Bidya Pant MD and Ravi Dhandari MD.
Bidya has become a dear friend to my family as a student of corneal transplants, where we opened the first corneal transplant service in Western Nepal.
More recently, our charity, BBH Eye Foundation, has worked with Dr. Bidya in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar to increase free cataract surgery. In coordination with his foundation, Charity Health Foundation Nepal, we have jointly opened 20 Primary Eye Care Clinics in southwestern Nepal.

In the photo above, Bidya is on the left and Ravi in the middle. Besides years of service in Nepal, Dr. Bidya’s travels twice yearly to the Tipitaka Charity Eye Hospital Myanmar where his schedule was beyond belief. He would examine in clinic 100 new patients each morning, in the afternoon another 100 follow-up patients and often squeeze in 45 cataract surgeries during the lunch break, six days a week.
When he was Medical Director at the Geta charity hospital in Nepal, they had a policy to perform surgery the same day on anyone who came to the clinic and was diagnosed with an operable dense cataract. One day he performed 308 cataract surgeries!