KEY POINTS:
Gabi Hollows, mother of five, widow of the late Fred, sits in the Fred Hollows Foundation headquarters in Mt Eden. She's feeling the cold after Sydney and is wrapped up in a black polo sweater and oversized jacket, dark hair pulled back in a pony tail, talking flat
out. She leans over and grabs a button on my blouse to illustrate a point about the foundation's eye surgery. "Your buttons are small, round," she says "just like a lens".
Later she hands me a mask with the bits you see through covered with dense, opaque plastic. It's like trying to see through rice paper. "That's what it's like when you have a cataract."
At 54, Gabi has spent much of her life working with her first husband. First was his campaign to wipe out blindness and eye disease in rural, mainly Aboriginal, Australia - much of it trachoma or "sandy blight" caused by overcrowding, secretion swapping and poor basic hygiene.
Later, when Hollows moved on to a campaign against cataract blindness, his wife was behind him too. This time they went to the Third World: Eritrea in Africa, Nepal, Vietnam and the Pacific Islands. Hollows' idea was to set up teams of doctors and medics who could insert small plastic intraocular lenses. Gabi, a Catholic, calls it the miracle of making the blind see again.
She holds up a lens. As she said, it is about the same size as my button, but made of soft flexible acrylic material that tapers into two springy hooks which fit around the eyeball. The patient is given a local anaesthetic, the surgeon (most of whom are locals trained by Hollows and his team) makes a small incision, probes the diseased lens out of the eyeball and slips in the artificial intraocular lens. A day later most patients can see again - in Vanuatu, for example, the success rate is 98 per cent
In 1993, when her husband died of cancer, Gabi took over his work. "When Fred was dying I promised him that we'd make his dreams come true."
The promise was a big one. Hollows was a hard talking, get-it-done kind of guy. His nickname was "Fearless Fred". He hated bureaucracy, multinationals who kept prices up, and wasting time. At the time he died he was helping set up a factory in Eritrea - one of the poorest countries in the world. The idea was to make cheap but quality intraocular lenses.
First World opthalmologists were paying between $100-$300 a lens and charging top dollar for inserting them in a complicated and delicate operation. Hollows was determined to make the whole procedure affordable enough to use on the poorest people in Australia, Africa and the Pacific.
He had trouble getting the multinationals to drop their prices, so set up factories. "Fred wanted three lens factories," explains his wife. "One in Eritrea, one in Nepal and one in Vietnam. Then, when the Vietnamese turned out to have enough doctors but too much red tape he decided: Right, we'll train doctors instead - 300 in three years. And then he goes and dies."
They buried Fred in Bourke, 12 hours drive from Sydney in the dry pan of red dirt and mulga he loved, then it was business as usual: within six weeks Gabi was in Vietnam, reassuring those 300 Vietnamese opthalmologists that the Foundation would continue.
And over the following 14 years she has carried the flag for the Fred Hollows Foundation throughout its territory, expanding it, enlisting more doctors and support staff, raising more money and helping where she can. Here in New Zealand she is a whirlwind of energy. She knows everyone by name, works until they plead for a lunch break.
It all started when 18-year-old Gabi O'Sullivan decided to train to be an orthoptist or specialist in ocular motility (how well the muscles in the eye are working and co-ordinating).
It was a predictable choice for a cross-eyed little girl who had her squint repaired when she was three. As she says, looking hard at me with her molten brown eyes, "I was a fabulous binocular result."
So there she was, 15 years later, applying for one of the eight places in the Prince of Wales Hospital's orthoptist class. "Two hundred people had applied," she says. "They interviewed 40 and took eight." The first lecture was conducted by the terrifying New Zealand-born opthalmologist, Dr Fred Hollows. "The lecture was at 7am. I was running a bit late. And I remember him asking 'which of you know the optics of a slit lamp?' When she replied 'We're sorry, but we don't know, sir' he said 'well, bloody pull it apart and find out'."
As well as teaching, Fred Hollows, who had been born in Palmerston North, studied medicine at Otago University and developed a huge sense of social justice, ran an interesting clinic. Private patients, including Lady Mary Fairfax and the Packers, sat alongside the needy. "And everyone got exactly the same from Fred. The only difference was, some got a bill."
Hollow's biggest concern was the high level of eye disease in the Aboriginal community. In 1971 he helped establish the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern and five years later dedicated three years to surveying and providing eye care in rural Australia. And Gabi, the team orthoptist, "hit the road" with him. Over the programme they visited 465 Aboriginal settlements, saw 62,000 aborigines; 27,000 were treated for trachoma and 1000 operations were performed.
Several years later, after Hollows' wife died, he asked Gabi for a date and in 1980 the opthalmologist and orthoptist were married. Over the next decade, five children - Cam, Emma, Anna-Louise and twins Ruth and Rosa - were added to Fred's Tanya and Ben, from his first marriage. And the work carried on. "All the babies felt the red dirt under their feet," says their mother, who worked alongside their husband. They slept in the back of the car, tents.
Hollows asked for help and the the Australian Government got behind the scheme. "Eighty visiting opthalmologists came and worked with us in the bush. They didn't care much about [not being] paid. That's the joy of opthalmology - giving someone back their sight is such an inspirational thing, so rewarding."
It was only when Cam went to secondary school that his mother "was grounded". By then Hollows had visited Nepal, Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh for the World Health Organisation, and made his first visit to Eritrea.
He had also been diagnosed with cancer and was getting sicker. But the work carried on. Says Gabi, "I've always had other people living in my house, helping: nannies, nieces, sisters-in-law, good neighbours ... "
In 1992, the year before Fred died, they founded the Fred Hollows Foundation with Gabi as a founding director. Its underpinning philosophy was about sustainability: teaching local doctors and businesspeople to do it for themselves.
A year later the Eritrean factory was running and the Hollows Foundation had forced the price of intraocular operations down to $25 per person - $5-$10 for the lens and around $15 for equipment and surgery.
"The factory opened in 1994 and Fred never saw it," says Gabi. "By the end of 2007 we estimate that 2.5 million of these lenses will have been manufactured."
A second lens factory opened in Nepal, and the United Nations built a surgical centre nearby.
"On the 10th anniversary of Fred's death we did our millionth lens on a lady in Pakistan." By 2006 the Foundation's programmes sight-tested over a million people in Africa and Asia, performed 73,838 cataract operations, trained 3781 eye health workers including 207 surgeons and clinicians, and 2.8 million intraocular lenses had been produced by the Fred Hollows Laboratories in Eritrea and Nepal.
Meanwhile Gabi met and married John Balazs, a Sydney tax lawyer. "John's the most amazing husband," she says. "I couldn't have done what I do without his help. He always says, 'Fred had all the fun of making the children, I enjoy paying for them'.
"I've been a full-time mother to my five children - and I couldn't have done it without all the support, the friends, the godparents, the big communal family around me." Now, including Balazs' daughter Kate, she has three 18-year-olds doing High School Certificate. "So I have triplets. Three kids doing the exam next week."
Her other job is to fly the flag for the Foundation. They've formed the Nepal Eye Programme in Nepal, manufactured a portable operating microscope that costs around $8000 rather than $40,000. "I've been to hundreds of events, done thousands of talks."
She has been awarded an Advance Australia Award for Community Service, a Centenary Medal and been named an Australian Living Treasure.
"People know if they gave Fred money today he'd spend it tomorrow," she says. "I say we'd spend it yesterday - and could we have a little bit more?" And when she looks at you with those brown eyes you can see why people do it.
"It's all about making Fred's dreams come true. To make these procedures affordable. He must still be doing cartwheels in heaven."
