One of the best parts about my job was that I get to meet the most extraordinary people.

People I would never meet in school or college, at a business conference or work event, in Boston or LA or New York, or at a wedding or a football game.

I met a man in India whom I will never forget, his name is Mritunjay Tiwary. He was a very successful businessman that came from a wealthy family. But he walked away from his lucrative career and very privileged life to help the blind.

And he is doing it in Bihar, one of the poorest places not just in India but in the world.

I traveled more than 30 hours to reach Bihar and meet Tiwary.

After 3 long plane rides, we found ourselves in an old van driving down dirt roads that took us back in time thousands of years. Men wearing turbans were herding sheep and cattle. Women wearing saris were carrying water, pots, dung, wood, and wheat on their heads. We saw children and adults working in the fields, harvesting crops by hand.

I could immediately see that this is one of the poorest places I have ever visited.

In Bihar, the average family is living on less than $1 a day. Day laborers make about 17 cents an hour. Literacy rates are 70% for men, 50% for women.

Tiwary told me that this region is so poor, that little boys hide in the bushes on the side of the road and wait for truck to come by hauling bags of grain. As it passes, they all fire off little rocks from their slingshots in the hopes that they can create a hole in a bag of grain and some of the grain will fall down off the truck into the road. After the truck is out of sight they run out into the road and scoop up any grain they can find.

Things have gotten so bad that some families will sell their son or daughter for $20.  That’s how much money it costs for a family of four to buy enough food to survive the winter.

In the middle of this godforsaken place, in the middle of nowhere, stands a beacon of hope. A tiny hospital called Ahkand Joti Eye Hospital. This 300-bed hospital gives 63,000 blind children and adults their eyesight back every year.

In a place where the experts said no hospital could ever survive.

Because there is no electricity.

Because the roads were so bad it would be impossible to transport patients.

Because people were too poor. It would be impossible to find enough paying patients that could then subsidize the patients who could pay nothing.

Because there were no major medical teaching universities within hundreds of miles making it impossible to hire eye surgeons.

That is what all the experts told Tiwary 10 years ago when he came to this empty field with plans to build an eye hospital.

Thank God he didn’t listen to them.

To get electricity for his hospital, Tiwary spends $10,000 a month on diesel fuel and runs generators 24/7.

To transport patients, he bought extra rugged buses and vans that can navigate the horrible roads and lack of infrastructure.

To attract great eye surgeons, ophthalmologists, anesthesiologists and other doctors and nurses Tiwary offers attractive salaries and great living accommodations.

And for support staff he did something few people do in India – he hired young women.

Hundreds of local young women who are trained to be a nurse assistants, administrators and managers.  He wants Akhand Joti to be the first major hospital in India staff and run entirely by women. They even have an all-women soccer team.

Tiwary also hired 55 outreach workers that helped run five outreach camps today to screen and find patients.  Supported by 700 community workers who literally go house to house to find blind children and adults.

On our way to the hospital, Tiwary took us to one of his blindness camps.

When we arrive, there are more than 1,000 children and adults who have come from all over India in the hope of curing their blindness.

They are all ages, from 9 months to 90 years old. In the U.S., blindness is rare and usually afflicts only senior citizens. But in developing countries, blindness is a virtual epidemic that affects all ages. It is 500% more prevalent than in the U.S.

More than 20 million children and adults in developing countries are what they call “needlessly blind.” That’s the name they call blind folks who can’t afford a surgery that costs as little as $25 and takes as little as 5 minutes.

Imagine remaining blind for your entire life solely because you couldn’t afford a $25 surgery.

The loudspeaker calls the names as hundreds of people crowded around different registration tables. Dozens of volunteers guide the patients through various stations.

The test for blindness is pretty simple. Unlike America where $50,000 machines are used to measure visual impairment, here they hand you the end of a 9-foot tape measure. On the other end, 9 feet away, someone holds up their hand and asks how many fingers you can see.

If you can’t count fingers correctly from 9 feet away, you are blind enough to receive surgery. Simple as that.

In America, anyone with even mild visual impairment, for example, anyone who complains of trouble driving at night, receives blindness surgery automatically.

But here, one of the poorest places on the planet, they can only provide surgeries for people who are extremely blind. If you can count the fingers, you need to wait until your vision gets worse and come back. Which is always does because blindness is a progressive condition.

To register, the women and men lined up in separate lines that went on and on. We slowly walked down the lines, taking photos, asking questions and listening to their stories. We could see the years of desperation and suffering etched in their faces.

Especially the women. When a man goes blind, the wife takes care of him. When the wife goes blind, the man takes a new wife.

To be blind in America is a tragedy. To be blind in a developing country is a matter of life or death. Here, they call a blind person a “mouth with no hands.”

If you can’t see, you can’t work. If you can’t work, you can’t survive.

60% of children die within 1-2 years of going blind according to the WHO.

There are no figures for adults.

In the back of the camp, we find all the blind children. Some were born completely blind. Some lost their vision at 3 years old, 10 years old, 15 years old.

Some lost their vision through accidents. We met a girl who lost hereyesight when a classmate hit her in the face with a stick.

The parents are worried their child won’t be picked for surgery. When they get picked for surgery, they worry it won’t work. In a developing country, having a blind child is worse than being blind yourself.

In spite of all the poverty and suffering, Tiwary tells us that his goal is to make Bihar, one of the smallest and poorest states in India, the first state to be free of curable blindness by the year 2020. We’re trying to help them scale up from 63,000 surgeries a year to 100,000 surgeries a year.

I admire his ambition, but it seems like an impossible goal. I look at the huge crowd and shake my head.  “This is overwhelming,” I tell Tiwary, the man in charge. “I bet you could do one of these camps every single day.”

He laughs and tells me, “We do 5 camps a day.”

If anyone can make Bihar blindness free, these are the folks who can do it.

I ask Tiwary if he ever regrets walking away from his business career, his lucrative job and fancy house.

He shakes his head and tells me, “Sure, there are times when this work can be frustrating, impossible, depressing and very, very difficult. But I have no regrets. I find more comfort for my soul out here in this village in Bihar than I do in my air-conditioned office in Calcutta.”