Seven Minutes To Light and Hope
In the last 15 years, the remote Himalayan nation of Nepal has seen at least 13 government changes, a bloody Maoist revolt, a palace massacre and a royal takeover. Through it all, Ruit has been quietly tackling preventable blindness at home and in other developing countries giving him a place of pride as an example for Nepal, one of the 10 poorest nations in the world.
Ruit, 53, is a shy man who shuns the limelight and is reticent to talk about his good work. But he has not escaped local attention and was lauded in a recent editorial in the English-language weekly Nepali Times.
"If sometimes we feel hopeless about our country's future we just need to look at visionaries like Ruit," editor Kunda Dixit wrote.
Ruit got his start as an eye surgeon with assistance from an Australian charity. He set up a small eye clinic in Kathmandu in 1994 designed to treat 60 people per day, and which has since expanded to a daily 600 patients.
The Tilganga Eye Centre runs an eye bank and operates eye camps in remote parts of Nepal where about 6,000 people a year receive sight-restoring cataract operations.
The eye camps have proved so successful that his center has run them in Bhutan, North Korea, Ethiopi
a, Bangladesh, China and India.
Removing cataracts is the most common surgical practice and the clouding of the lens in the eye is the leading form of blindness in the developing world.
"Dr Ruit is a most outstanding surgeon and has probably done more intraocular lens surgery than anyone else on the planet," said Gabi Hollows, widow of Fred Hollows, Ruit's Australian mentor.
Ruit was born into a poor family in rural Nepal. His father paid for primary school in Darjeeling, India, and a government scholarship allowed him to study medicine in that country. He qualified as an eye specialist before returning to Nepal and eventually meeting Hollows.
His interest in medicine was piqued at the age of 17 for very personal reasons.
"One of my elder sisters was getting treatment for tuberculosis, which was very serious in those days. She developed resistance to most of the available medicines and I saw her die in front of me. That got into my head pretty strongly," Ruit said.
At an early stage in his career in the 1980s, he met Australian eye surgeon Fred Hollows, and the two continued to be close friends until Hollows's death from cancer in 1993.
Hollows and Ruit shared the belief that modern surgical techniques and equipment from developed countries could be adapted for use in developing countries, where blinding cataracts were widespread. "We knew that if we could do it in Nepal, we could do it anywhere," Ruit said.
With massive levels of poverty, dismal infrastructure and a majority of the population living in remote rural areas, Ruit and Hollows initially faced huge challenges in the mountainous country.
"We really struggled in the beginning and went to eye camps and started to fine tune the surgical technique and try to find out how equipment could be simplified," Ruit said.
The technique perfected by Ruit and Hollows involves the removal of a clouded lens from the eye and replacing it with a special plastic lens.
After thousands of operations, the surgeons have the operation down to a tee. They take between seven and 10 minutes per eye, and the procedure "has a 100 percent success rate, if it's done properly," said Bhagirat Baniya, the eye clinic's chief administrator..
Instead of stitches, electricity is used to seal the hole in the eye caused by the surgery, reducing the risk of infection when operating in makeshift clinics in remote areas.
The cost of the plastic lenses was initially prohibitively expensive, so Hollows and Ruit planned to open a lab to produce their own high- quality, low-cost lenses. Hollows did not live to see it, but eventually, after 2 years of trial and error, the lab started successfully producing lenses in 1996.
"In 1995 when we had to import the lenses, they were US$85(HK$663). Now we sell them for US$4," Baniya said.
The 65 people who work in the lab produce a huge surplus of lenses which they sell to 35 developing countries at cost.
Poverty-stricken Nepal is riven with profound caste, political, gender and ethnic divisions. But Ruit has never let it get in the way of his work.
"With all the political upheaval he has never turned a hair. For him the priority has always been the next person in line to be given back their sight," said Gabi Hollows, who continues to be involved in the Fred Hollows Foundation.
Despite having performed thousands of operations, Ruit says he is always moved when a patient's sight is restored.
In June, Ruit was given the Ramon Magsaysay award, popularly known as the Asian Nobel prize. Ruit accepted the award but went straight back to work. "We don't like to have a high profile. After the award I preferred to get back to work rather than do interviews," he said. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE