The Big Picture

Raj Kaliya Dhanuk

Boston.com has a regular feature called “The Big Picture“, which regularly publishes some the most impressive photography on the internet. They’ve recently shared their favourites of 2010 in three parts, 120 photos over three days.

Number 38 on December 16th was the photo above, taken by Gemunu Amarasinghe, which whom fans and supporters of the London Vision Foundation will be familiar with, as we’ve used many photos from this excellent photographer’s work in Katmandu, Nepal. The image is of:

Raj Kaliya Dhanuk lies still on a bed with weights on her eye after receiving local anesthesia at Hetauda community eye hospital in Hetauda, about 40 kilometers (18 miles) south of Katmandu, Nepal on Feb.13, 2010. Dhanuk and more than 500 others, most of whom have never seen a doctor before, traveled for days by bicycle, motorbike, bus and even on their relatives’ backs to reach Dr. Sanduk Ruit’s mobile eye camp. Once condemned by the international medical community as unthinkable and reckless, this mass surgery “in the bush” started spreading from Nepal to poor countries worldwide nearly two decades ago.

(AP Photo/ Gemunu Amarasinghe)