Giving Sight To The Blind

The Incredible Vision of Dr. Geoff Tabin and The Himalayan Cataract Project

by Ace Kvale

I met Himalayan Cataract Project (HCP) co-founder Geoff Tabin in 2004 when I traveled to Sikkim, India to document Tabin in the field. The HCP travels to developing countries to implement a multi-faceted approach to curing preventable blindness including education and training of local medical professionals, mobile eye surgery camps, and the construction of community eye centers and hospitals.

I came away from this trip with not only some of the best images of my career but with a new purpose and a different view of life. Since then, I have volunteered and photographed at five eye camps in India, Nepal, Ethiopia, and Rwanda.

As a climber and adventurer I’d read about the exploits of Geoff Tabin. He had climbed the world’s tallest peaks by the most difficult routes, and his partners were the elite of the climbing world. The humanitarian side of Tabin came as a surprise. His goal is far loftier than the world’s highest summits: to eradicate curable blindness in his lifetime.

The Himalayan Cataract Project has performed over half a million free cataract surgeries in India and Nepal since 1995. The model is so successful that they have expanded to the impoverished nations of Africa where cataract blindness affects approximately 4 million people. In Africa as elsewhere in the third-world blindness is a death sentence. Sight restored is a life restored.

As Geoff said to me one day on a lengthy walk at dawn before a 12 hour day in the operating room: “While most doctors would rather drive a new BMW, I can give thousands of people sight a year!”

Ace Kvale On behalf of Himalayan Cataract Project