Geoff Tabin Presentation

Being blind is a challenge anywhere; however in the Third World it is often a death sentence. In the developing world there are approximately 150 million functionally blind people; as a result of their condition they have one-third the life expectancy of a sighted person. As overwhelming as those statistics are, sight can be restored to more than eighty percent of these folks. That is where noted eye surgeon Dr. Geoff Tabin steps in.

Returning from the top of Mt. Everest in 1988, Tabin (who would later become the fourth man to climb the Seven Summits and one of the creators of bungee jumping–but that’s another story) came across a Dutch surgical team performing cataract surgery on a woman. The encounter changed his life; then an orthopedic resident Tabin switched specialties and chose ophthalmology. Soon after Tabin joined forces with Dr. Sanduk Ruit, a visionary Nepali ophthalmologist who believed that with the right approach they could eliminate preventable blindness.

Over the past decades Tabin and Ruit have honed that approach. Typically Tabin and a team of medical professionals set up shop in a small country like Nepal or Ethiopia; over several days they perform hundreds of operations. They also teach surgical skills to local doctors and help those doctors continue to work to reduce the number of blind people in their country.

On a recent trip to Ethiopia Tabin took along longtime Mountainfilm guest and professional climber Timmy O’Neill. The plan was to repair thousands of eyes, and then climb some nearby mountains. You can hear from these two men how it didn’t go quite according to plan.