Tabin Headlines Annual Manhattan Dinner
November 2007Titoune Bouchard and Geoff Tabin all dolled up for the New York Section's annual dinner.
Susan E.B. Schwartz reports on the New York Section's annual dinner.
When you attend the annual New York Section black-tie dinner, you know what’s in store: another evening of great company and conversation, against the backdrop of another scintillating slideshow from a god of climbing.
But the show this year was different.
Held as usual in the venerable Union Club of New York City, the New York Section dinner October 28 attracted its usual glitterati turnout. But the guest of honor was Dr. Geoffrey Tabin with the slideshow “Incredible Dreams”—less about his achievements in the mountains than those in his other life in medicine. With humor and humanity, Geoff interwove the two themes—including real-life video footage of an eye operation—while offering a slideshow filled with higher meaning than can be found on any mountain summit.
Geoff’s shows are a perennial favorite on the climbing circuit—he was the fourth person to complete the “Seven Summits”—and his presentations traditionally feature social commentary, as well as images of his climbing team in Irian Jaya in Western Papua completely au naturel except for two-foot-long native penis gourds.
“Incredible Dreams” highlights Geoff’s work in the Himalayan Cataract Project, which he cofounded in 1994 and through which he cures preventable blindness in developing countries. His slideshow traces the path of the Yale-Harvard-Oxford-Brown-trained ophthalmologist from Ivy League to high peaks and to meaningful, life-changing Himalayan corneal transplant surgery.
The evening kicked off with an elegant dinner that the AAC section head, Phil Erard, introduced with his customary graciousness; a short trailer that John Light produced as a volunteer for the AAC; and the traditional introduction of new AAC New York Section members. (The cosmopolitan Manhattan line-up included an authentic sheep farmer.)
Phil Powers, AAC executive director, spoke briefly about the club, which this year posted 13 percent growth and record membership levels, and is undertaking new initiatives like the Bradford Washburn American Mountaineering Museum (to open in February 2008). Dr. Sam Silverstein presented a short slide show on the 40th anniversary climb of Mt. Vinson in Antarctica—a moving tribute, since only four out of the original group were alive and able to return. Antarctic peaks have been named in honor of all the team members, spurring one—the renowned mountaineer and raconteur Nick Clinch—to declare: “Better a peak than a crevasse.”
But the evening belonged to Dr. Tabin. His slide show started with highlights of his climbing career, including his participation in the 1983 Everest East Face expedition—which placed six team members on top of the peak’s daunting Kangshung Face. Geoff, who had been picked for the third summit team, was refreshingly candid about how he was fortunate that bad weather moved in and he never got the chance, since he was the weakest member on the team. (He later summitted Everest in 1988 via the South Col on the expedition that placed the first two American women on the top.)
Geoff also shared his highbrow poetic bent, inspired by the challenge that he and his team members faced on the walk out from Everest: leeches nestling in private parts. He intoned an opus that began, “Leeches on my penis…”
Geoff had his life’s epiphany walking out of Everest, when he was asked to fill in as a replacement doctor at a nearby clinic. There he saw firsthand the terrible health toll that poor hygiene, poor living conditions, and bad water takes on people in developing countries. Geoff also realized that while many public health problems can’t be prevented, there was one striking exception: cataracts.
He says, “Millions of people are blinded by cataracts in developing countries. Blindness is a major problem there, occurring at a rate 10 times higher than in other countries. It’s so accepted and so common, that people often say, ‘The hair turns white, your eyes turn white [from cataracts], and then you die.’”
Yet 85 percent of blindness in developing countries is also treatable and preventable. Amazed, Geoff had watched as a Dutch team of doctors in Nepal performed surgery to remove the cataracts, and people who had been blind could see the next day.
But there were few doctors who could perform the surgery and many who needed it. The thought occurred to Geoff: Why not teach and train local people to perform modern cataract surgery?
Geoff had found his calling. Currently a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Utah, Geoff spends several months each year in the Himalaya to perform cataract surgery and train others. In 2006, his team performed thousands of corneal lens implant surgeries, at a total cost of only $12 per patient, with most surgeries totally free to the patient. Geoff has expanded his cataract clinics to Nepal, Pakistan, Tibet, Bhutan, North Korean, Ghana, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
Geoff says, “The surgery is now so perfected that patients go from seeing only light and shadow to one day later seeing 20/20.”
For more information on the Himalayan Cataract Project, click here.
Susan E.B. Schwartz is author of Into the Unknown, the biography of Hans Kraus. Her website is www.susanebschwartz.com. This article previously appeared at Rockandice.com.