WilliamsMemo27


 * Williams Memo 27 Describing People**

You have seen the Buddhist prayer flags during your stay here, yes? Do you recall how they are connected with four points leading to a center? Imagine that this center is confidence, confidence in your goal which happens to be providing eye care to thousands of impoverished people in Nepal. How do you build this center, this confidence? This question is too difficult yes? I will ask a simpler one then -- how do you build just one eye hospital? I started out doing eye surgeries for the Nepal Eye Hospital in a boarding house. I worked alone for years there seeing one patient at a time day after day. This is after the government had assigned me to eye camps in the most rural of areas -- not exactly the life I imagined when doing my training in London and America. It was a struggle within me to see the need and feel helpless. What does one do in such a situation? You do your very best but hard work by itself is not enough. Hard work just makes you tired and then you work not as hard, eh? The royal government sent me to the World Health Organization meeting in 1978. That is where I found myself with a group of physicians who were just as dedicated to struggle, to fighting for the health of those who cannot fight themselves. That is when we started the NGO for preventable blindness ( the WHO PBL). Dr. Nicole Grasset helped to show me the way to make hard work count. Her American and European friends became my American and European friends and benefactors. It was their commitment -- financial and otherwise -- that allowed us to even think to start the WHO PBL. You see now, how hard work is nothing without commitment. But these two things, while good, are not enough to build confidence. Money is a great thing to have, but without vision it can do little. Vision is necessary -- a vision with breadth and depth. Not hyperopic now -- that is too far to see well. (He chuckles). A small joke. (He pauses). Yes, vision is required to transform financial commitment and professional dedication and also hard work into something unique and powerful like an NGO with goals that it fulfills. And so we started with these three things. But you may know already -- government officials in third world countries are like people everywhere. Some are good, and some are corrupt. So the fourth thing we needed it took us a few years to determine. And that fourth pillar is transparency -- in the way we planned, in the way we organized, in the way we implemented our goals. The first goal being to determine the needs of those who had curable blindness. We came to this point from 1978 to 1980 through constant motivation, dedication of people and funds, a transforming vision, and transparent supervision. These four things led to a survey and we determined the scope of need in Nepal. And once the ministry of Health, and, wealthy landowners, and the people of Nepal could see that we had these four, then they joined us in an outpouring of confidence. And with this confidence as our center, we could begin to build the NGO Nepal Netra Jyoti Sangh, which from 1981 to 1991 grew from just Nepal eye Hospital to 16 hospitals all over the country.
 * __Imaginary interview transcript excerpt with Dr. Ram Prasad Pokhrel__**

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Analytic Point: I started out trying to articulate Pokhrel's view of how networks work in the world but ended up discussing his (potentially) holistic vision of how to do social service/development work. I don't know even if he is Buddhist or Hindu. But I based it on this beautiful architecture called Bodnath Stupa which apparently is part of Tibetan Buddhism. I originally came to this idea by thinking about spider-webs as networks. The 'facts' contained herein are based on skimming his online biography and part of his autobiographic text, __Reaching the Unreached: Three Decades of Struggle in Nepal__. Some allowances must be made for fact-checking as I probably mixed up a few dates, and, or, locations of meetings in constructing this story.

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