Posted by Penny Lyons, Executive Director, Seva Canada As I write this, out the airplane window to my left the Himalayas are displayed in all their glory. We have just left Kathmandu and are en-route to Lhasa. It is disconcerting as everyone sitting on the right side of the plane has leapt up to peer out of the windows on the left to catch a glimpse of Everest. Not a good flyer at the best of times, I bite my tongue to keep from shouting at everyone to sit down before they tip the plane over. But I am getting ahead of myself. We left quiet and beautiful Tansen and headed east along the major east-west connector that separates the Terai from the hill district. Bharatpur in the district of Chitwan is our destination. Chitwan is famous for its jungle and game parks where rhino and elephant are common and tigers are rumored to exist although I have never met anyone who has actually seen one.

Nepal boy after cataract surgery. Photo courtesy of Geoff Bugbee

Bharatpur Eye Hospital is another of Seva’s significant partners in Nepal. Prior to Seva’s partnership with Bharatpur, beginning about 10 years ago, the facility was stagnant – seeing few patients and performing fewer surgeries. Now, with just two ophthalmologists, 5 ophthalmic assistants and 4 eye workers they see over 60,000 outpatients annually and perform over 4,500 cataract surgeries both at the hospital and at screening and surgical camps. What is most impressive about this facility is that significantly more women than men are receiving treatment – 55% of the patients are women. Although women are more likely than men to become blind (about 2/3 of all blindness is borne by women) they are far less likely to get treated for cultural, economic and religious reasons. To see patient data that shows men and women receiving treatment equally is gratifying, to see women being treated more often than men is cause for celebration. Providing frequent eye care training to village level female health volunteers appears to be the secret to their success. We leave the next day for the drive back to Kathmandu. A major Hindu festival is about to begin where 12 different gods are worshipped on successive days. The drive should take about four hours but extends to seven. There is one highway, and it is in reasonably good shape. It has the ubiquitous sheer drops to the valley below but now with the added excitement of having very large trucks bearing down on us at impossible speeds. The death trucks (as I fondly named them) are abundant as Kathmandu has a large population to feed and maintain and this is the only way in or out to the south. Sometimes there are only millimeters of space between two trucks trying to get by each other and god help the hapless motorbike rider who decides he can squeeze in between. It is dirty, dusty, polluted, noisy and dangerous on this highway and the vast numbers of homes, families and small children living and making their livelihood beside it is heartbreaking. The kids must have lungs that look like coal miners by the time they are teenagers. I sit in our air conditioned vehicle shielded from it all and wonder how someone survives in such misery. Our final two days in Nepal are in Kathmandu. We wrap up discussions on programs, give our thanks to the staff, spend a little time catching up on work, talk about what we have seen and ways we can fulfill all of the requests that have come our way. Our partners want to be better surgeons, better technicians, better managers. They want to learn more and teach more.  They want to reach those people still without care and without hope. As always, we leave even more committed than when we arrived; determined to do our job better so our partners can do theirs.

Gratitude in Nepal. Photo courtesy of Dr. Martin Spencer