The Barefoot Surgeon
Page 8
while the iron was hot. He’d previously been offered a
position in the ophthalmology department at the Academic
Medical Center, a large university hospital in Amster-
dam, which at the time, had become a world leader in eye
surgery. Nanda quickly arranged to work there, too, in the
corneal surgery department. They were going to elope to
the Netherlands.
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They held a simple ceremony in Ruit’s apartment on
26 January 1987. They exchanged rings and vows in front
of eight friends, then all crammed into his friend Shushil
Panta’s Volkswagon Beetle and celebrated over lunch at the
Shangri- La Hotel. At the time, Ruit had about 7000 rupees
or about $50 to his name. The wedding cost half of that.
Ruit wore a suit and Nanda wore a maroon sari with a white
cardigan. Her hair was swept up off her face in a chignon,
showing off pretty earrings.
They flew out of Kathmandu the next week, and were
installed in a small rented apartment in Haarlem, a gabled
town not far from Amsterdam, surrounded by tulip farms.
Ruit was 33, and Nanda was 25. They hardly had any money
at all between them, but at long last, they were together. They strolled through the cobblestone streets, and over the canals and bridges, and visited the cathedrals and museums.
It was bitterly cold, and as well as the thrill of finally being together, the young couple both suffered from culture shock.
Their senses were overwhelmed by the machinery of Western
life. Trams. Lifts. Washing machines. The electronic key of
their apartment on the 23rd floor. ‘Everything was strange to us. Living in a high rise, electronic doors, and the way people rushed about all the time. We were used to hot dal and rice for lunch, and instead we learnt to go to the shops and buy
cold sandwiches and apples or peaches,’ Ruit says.
One of Ruit’s ophthalmologist friends, Jan Kok, took the
couple under his wing, taking them out to lunch or dinner
almost every day, and quietly explained the cultural subtle-
ties. Those months in Amsterdam were the happiest in their
lives. Their work at the hospital was completely absorbing.
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Dutch eye doctors such as Jan Worst and Cornelius D Bink-
horst were making great strides in revolutionary cataract
surgery. Up-
and-
coming surgeons were flying in from
around the globe to make unofficial pilgrimages to see their
work. Ruit revelled in the sophisticated equipment, and
took notes on the finely- honed way the Dutch examined
their patients.
As the time drew nearer for them to return to Kath-
mandu, Nanda and Ruit grew anxious. There had been no
contact at all with their families; no letters or phone calls home because they knew their families would be furious with
them when they found out they had eloped. Nanda knew her
brothers had contacted the embassies in both Nepal and the
Netherlands, trying to find out where they were and whether
they’d got married.
As they strolled along the canals, they tried to work out
the next step. They had to think of a way they could stay
together, away from the judgment of Nepalese society.
~
Ruit’s mind turned to Professor Fred Hollows, a brilliant,
unorthodox Australian eye doctor he’d befriended two years
previously, in 1985, when Hollows was on a six- week sabbat-
ical, researching the prevalence of trachoma in Nepal for the World Health Organization.
As a junior doctor at the Nepal Eye Hospital, Ruit had
been sent to collect the professor from Kathmandu’s airport.
Ruit was expecting to meet a typical Western eye doctor who,
like so many others, wanted a taste of Third World work
before a holiday trek in the mountains.
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Many Western doctors adopted a patronising air when
they flew in, conveying the sense, if subtly, to the Nepalese surgeons, that they were lucky to have someone of such
calibre at their hospital. It was expected that the Nepalese
surgeons would carry their luggage for them at the airport.
Local surgeons would humbly ask the visiting Western
doctors to finish their operation for them.
But Hollows smashed right through that mould as soon as
he landed at Kathmandu airport. It took Ruit a long time to
find the Australian because he expected an officious- looking man in a tie and suit. Eventually, a long- haired bloke in an untucked shirt, with a pipe hanging out of the side of his
mouth, wandered up to the luggage carousel and said, ‘You
must be looking for me, are you, mate?’
The pair hit it off from the start. Fred Hollows had made
a name for himself as a champion of Australia’s Indige-
nous population. He was horrified when he discovered that
the Aboriginal people in remote areas were living in miser-
able conditions, plagued, among many other diseases, by
trachoma, an agonisingly painful infection in the eye that
leads to blindness.
Even though the disease had been stamped out in most
Western nations more than a century ago, it remained in
epidemic proportions in these outback communities, mainly
because of overcrowding and lack of clean water. So, Hollows
had set off on a gruelling, two- year crusade, belting across the deserts with a small team, treating the local Aborigines
and recording the data. The outraged press conferences he
held afterwards, highlighting their plight, shamed the government into action. Hollows’ was a logistical feat that has not 67
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since been repeated and it blazed the trail for making Aboriginal health a priority. Australians loved him for it, and he
was later awarded the nation’s highest order, the Order of
Australia.
Yet, here he was, with no airs or graces whatsoever.
Hollows swung his backpack over his own shoulder, reached
out to shake hands with Ruit and walked along beside him as
if they were equals.
Hollows watched Ruit hard at work at the Nepal Eye
Hospital, admiring his extraordinary speed and precision,
and began wondering how he could support the brilliant
young surgeon. Hollows was eager to join him on the hospi-
tal’s outreach camps to get a feel for the scope of blindness in rural Nepal. They travelled to remote villages in a jeep, with Ruit at the wheel, and Hollows quickly became as enthralled
by the energy and spirit of the cataract camps as Ruit. They
dossed down at night in cow sheds, shepherd’s huts or tents.
Hollows had no problem with instant noodles for dinner as
long as it was washed down with gallons of rum and whisky.
Ruit recalls that they had to keep sending for alcohol supplies when Hollows came to the camps.
It was at one of these remote camps, near Mount Everest,
<
br /> that the two bonded, and became, as Fred puts it, ‘soul
mates’. A dwarf had come into the clinic, blind in both eyes
from severe cataracts. In Nepal’s caste system, a dwarf was
untouchable, which means technically he was also untreat-
able. But Hollows was used to defying convention. He
immediately said he’d like to try removing the man’s cata-
racts in the hospital in Kathmandu. Ruit was at first shocked.
Then delighted. He gave the man 60 rupees for the bus fare to 68
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Kathmandu and then said: ‘Let’s stuff it up the noses of those bloody Brahmins [the highest caste, often the doctors] in the eye hospital.’
‘I felt like I’d found a brother in ophthalmology,’ Ruit
says. ‘We seemed to understand each other so well. Fred used
to hold up his hand and say, “Why are these five fingers so
different [in] length, Sanduk? And why are some countries
so poor?” I loved every word of our conversations.’ Hollows
was as brash and outspoken as Ruit was polite and reserved,
but they were both obsessively driven about high- quality eye care being the birthright of everyone.
Hollows was as appalled as Ruit by the prevalence of
old- style surgeries still being performed in the Nepal Eye
Hospital, when, at the same time in the West, intraocular lens transplantation—light years ahead when it came to restoring
vision—had become mainstream practice.
Hollows was so smitten by Nepal and his young colleague’s
vision, he asked his wife Gabi, an orthoptist, to come from
Australia to Nepal with their two young children. So, with
four- year- old Cam and 27- month- old Emma, whom Gabi was
still breastfeeding, the group travelled through the country-
side, visiting Ruit’s parents in Hille, as well as eye camps.
‘Gabi was extremely supportive of my dreams right from
the start, sometimes even more so than Fred,’ Ruit recalls.
‘She was fascinated by it all, and knew the technical details of what we were talking about, which was wonderful.’
Fred and Gabi were deeply impressed by how driven Ruit
was and how organised the Nepalese were. They’d done all the
research; counting and measuring how many people needed
help. It was obvious that Ruit was determined to work out a
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way to reach the blind. In Gabi’s words, ‘It was more a matter of working out a way that we could help him.’
Ruit idolised Fred Hollows, not just because he was from
the West. He admired the way he treated everyone the same
way, whether ‘they were a peasant or a king’.
He also admired him because he had no fear. Ruit was
trained to be courteous, even when angered. But Hollows
just didn’t seem to care what anyone thought about him. He
would tell government officials, ministers, anyone who was
annoying him, to ‘Just bugger off’.
During their six weeks together, Hollows had invited Ruit
several times to come and visit him in Sydney and learn the
latest tricks in the rapidly changing field of cataract surgery.
He wanted to show him how things were done at the Prince
of Wales Hospital near his home in Randwick, Sydney, where
he ran the ophthalmology department.
Now, looking for a safe haven where he and Nanda could
begin their married life, he decided to take up Hollows’ offer.
Ruit rang him from a payphone at the end of the street in
Amsterdam. Before the era of Skype and Facetime, such calls
were expensive, so he got straight to the point. He suggested it might be the right time to come and visit. He also told
Hollows rather sheepishly that he was married.
‘His response was just so typically laid- back,’ Ruit recalls.
‘After a bit of a pause, he just said, “All right, Sanduk! I’d better book two bloody tickets for you then!”’
For the young couple, the offer seemed like manna from
heaven. They knew they would face the disapproval of their
families once they returned to Nepal, because they had eloped and were of different castes. Within a few days, they had
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arranged for Australian visas in The Hague and waited for
Hollows to send tickets. Instead of flying eastwards back
home to Kathmandu, they were going to veer south over the
Middle East and boom out over the Indian Ocean, then down
to the Great Southern Land.
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7
Travelling light
Ruit was fascinated by his first views out of the plane window as they banked over the Pacific Ocean and flew up the glittering coastline toward Sydney. There just seemed to be so much
sea and sky. The blue and green seemed to go on forever. Gabi met them at the airport and drove them back to Farnham
House, the rambling sandstone mansion in the leafy eastern
suburbs that the Hollows family called home.
It was late summer in Sydney, and the air was heady with
the scent of jasmine. The light was so bright it seemed to hurt their eyes. Gabi, as usual, chattered on, hardly pausing for
breath. She and Nanda quickly became friends. ‘They suited
each other perfectly because Gabi talked, and Nanda listened.
Gabi always said Nanda made her feel calm,’ says Ruit.
The young couple did not know what to make of things
when they first arrived at Farnham House. Hollows had bought
the 19th- century former convent in the 1970s, and had reno-
vated the dilapidated, eleven- bedroom, tin- roofed building into a home of great warmth and charm. He and Gabi decided they
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wanted a house that was open to the world as well as a family home, and it quickly came to host an ebb and flow of visitors and long- term house guests. There were seven doors to Farnham House and they were always open to the ocean breeze and a
constant stream of visitors. Poets, writers, mountain climbers, Eritrean and Vietnamese surgeons, politicians and filmmakers, as well as Fred and Gabi’s seemingly endless extended network of family and friends, all made their way through the doors, day and night.
‘Nanda and I thought it was like living at New Delhi
railway station,’ recalls Ruit. ‘After waiting for someone to make us a cup of tea for about three days, we realised it was the fashion to do it yourself.’
They eventually got the hang of it, dangling a tea bag in a
mug and getting bread out of the freezer to make their own
sandwiches or toast.
Nanda couldn’t believe the way there were always empty
cups of tea all over the kitchen table, or the kaleidoscope of people who swirled through the dining room and kitchen.
One time there were two parties going on simultaneously—
one in the back garden, and the other on the front lawn,
overlooking the ocean.
But what Farnham House lacked in conventionality was
more than compensated for by the way the honeymooners
were made to feel welcome. Nanda and Gabi would sit around
the open fireplace at night, knitting baby clothes with the other house guests. Fred used to call it the ‘Knitting Circle’.
Fred and Gabi’s children Cam and Emma would zoom
about the verandas on their tricycles while Gabi was nursing
their newborn, Anna- Louise, who became Ruit and Nanda’s
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goddaughter. The Hollows family would set a place at the
table every night for a ‘mystery guest’—anyone they knew
who wanted to stay for a while and enjoy the meal and some
conversation. It was always filled.
Ruit went to the Prince of Wales Hospital, fifteen minutes’
walk up the hill from Farnham House, and practised intra-
ocular lens surgery every day with state- of- the- art equipment.
Hollows looked over Ruit’s shoulder as he effortlessly sur-
passed him in technical skill and speed. It was obvious to
Fred and Gabi that Ruit was remarkably talented. They had
a star in the making. They called him ‘Golden Hands’.
Nanda melted into family life with the Hollows. She would
walk up to the Prince of Wales Hospital and join Ruit for
lunch several times a week. She helped Gabi take Cam to
school. She’d hold Emma’s hand while Gabi pushed Anna-
Louise in her pram through the parks or down the hill toward
Coogee Bay, trying to cajole her baby to sleep.
Gabi correctly assumed that the young couple didn’t have
much money. ‘We didn’t tell her, but we actually had almost
nothing at all,’ Ruit says. ‘She knew we were too shy to ask, so she would just quietly tuck money into our pockets.’
They went to nearby Bronte Beach, sat on the grass over-
looking the ocean, enjoyed barbecues in the park, dreamed,
and talked about the future. They went bushwalking in the
Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney, and were embraced by
the fifteen or so other Nepalese living in Sydney at the time, such as Indra Ban, who later formed the Nepalese Australian
Association.
The Nepalese would gather in each other’s homes, speak
their mother tongue and cook Nepalese food. Ban’s heart went
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