When a nurse peeled back the bandage from 84-year-old Gladys Khoza’s eye the morning after her cataract surgery, the first word out of her mouth was one that said everything: wow. Khoza had been waiting nearly a year to have the simple 15-minute procedure that would clear her clouded lens and let her see her family again, and she was one of 133 people who had their sight restored during a remarkable surgical marathon conducted by volunteer doctors at two hospitals near Johannesburg, South Africa, in March. Some of the patients had been on government waiting lists since 2019, part of a backlog that now stands at more than 240,000 people across South Africa, where 300,000 new cataract cases are diagnosed every year and where the WHO identifies cataract surgery as one of the most cost-effective medical procedures in the world and the leading intervention for curable blindness.
During the three-day marathon at Pholosong Regional Hospital, a new patient was brought to the table roughly every 30 minutes as gospel music played on speakers to sustain the surgeons through long shifts, with two doctors at times working concurrently on separate patients to speed things along. Dr. Tebogo Fakude, one of the volunteer surgeons, said his own mother had lost her sight and that restoring vision alleviates something far deeper than physical impairment alone. The surgical marathon program began on Mandela Day in 2023 as a tribute to South Africa’s first Black president, and has since grown into a recurring public-private partnership running several times a year with the explicit goal of eliminating the backlog entirely. Another patient, 72-year-old Molefe Mokoena, said after four years of poor vision all he wanted was to see his great-grandchildren and drive his car again, and he left that weekend able to do both.
