percent of the patients pay a smaller amount based on what they are able to pay. The remaining third of the patients receive the cataract surgical care entirely free. With this model, the facilities are able to cover all costs. Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology (TIOC) is the flagship of the Nepal Eye Program and the current facility was opened in 1994. It is a non-profit, community based, non-government organization that is committed to providing eye care services and implementing the Vision 2020 concept of elimination of avoidable blindness. TEC's goal is to act as a model for treatment, research and training, in cooperation with all other eye care centres and organizations in Nepal. Dr. Sanduk Ruit Dr. Sanduk Ruit grew up in a remote village in Eastern Nepal. He attended school in India and completed his three-year ophthalmology residency at the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, India. He also completed fellowships in microsurgery in the Netherlands and Australia as well as additional ophthalmic training at the Wilmer Eye Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of Michigan. In 1986 Ruit met Professor Fred Hollows from Sydney, Australia while Hollows visited Nepal as a World Health Organization consultant. He went on to study with him for 14 months at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital. Hollows was Ruit's mentor and inspiration in the work that he does. When Ruit returned to Nepal he was instrumental in the formation of the Nepal Eye Program and worked on a large epidemiological survey of blindness in Nepal. He was the first Nepali doctor to perform cataract surgery with intraocular lens implants and pioneered the use of microsurgical extra-capsular cataract extraction with posterior chamber lens implants in remote eye camps. Although other important international organizations sponsored eye camps in the region providing eye care and training local ophthalmologists, the camps established by Ruit were the first to introduce the use of intraocular lenses in cataract surgery. Put simply, this is the removal of the cataract and insertion of a plastic intraocular lens. Dr. Geoffrey Tabin Dr. Geoffrey Tabin is Professor of Ophthalmology and Global Medicine at Stanford University and the Byers Eye Institute. He graduated from Yale University and earned a master's degree in philosophy at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1985. His background