Suka and Kali Maya, an elderly Nepalese couple, fell in love as teenagers and ran away from home to start their life as a couple together.
They raised three children in a remote village in the mountainous Gorkha District, barely meeting their family’s needs through subsistence farming. Their grown children now live in nearby towns, busy with families of their own.
Suka and Kali Maya were now enjoying life as elders, still working hard to maintain their home and farm – and still caring lovingly for each other. Then Suka began to lose his sight.
As his vision diminished, so did his ability to farm and care for himself. As a result, Kali Maya became solely responsible for the household, the farming, and taking care of Suka. She quickly became overwhelmed by this doubled burden of work, while Suka felt helpless but sadly resigned to their new life: “I thought poor vision was just a part of growing old, that there was nothing we could do about it.” said Kali Maya.
Luckily, their daughter Devna works as a schoolteacher near a Community Eye Centre (CEC) in the neighbouring town of Salyantar. She heard the CEC would be running an eye screening camp supported by Seva Canada donors, and told her father. At the eye camp, Suka was diagnosed with bilateral cataracts and transported to Bharatpur Eye Hospital for his first round of life-changing cataract surgery, all thanks to Seva donors like you.
The timing of Suka’s surgery was ideal, as Kali Maya very soon began to lose her vision, too. But the couple now knew just what to do. When the next eye camp arrived in their area, Suka took his wife’s hand and the couple spent the next two days walking to the camp to save her sight.
Together, they were transported to the eye hospital for surgery; Kali Maya for her first cataract surgery, and Suka for surgery on his other eye.
“I just want to see my granddaughter’s face clearly for the first time,” said Kali Maya
“I just want to see my granddaughter’s face clearly for the first time,” said Kali Maya before they left, hand-in-hand, for the return walk home.
Kali Maya and Suka after their cataract surgeries right before they walked home, hand in hand.
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