Vision Restored
Cataract patient (name withheld)
After years of fading eyesight, she received free cataract surgery through a CRUD eye camp. Today she lives independently at home — watch her tell the story in her own words.
Habiganj, Sylhet
[ Team photo — early CRUD volunteers, Habiganj ]
Our story
A homecoming, a habit, then an institution.
CRUD — the Committee for Rural and Urban Development — was founded in September 1998 in Habiganj, Sylhet, by a small group of Bangladeshi physicians and German-trained returnees. The goal was modest: run weekend eye camps for villages no ophthalmologist would otherwise visit.
What started as a few hundred patients a year is now four hundred thousand. The eye camps grew into a hospital. The hospital became a teaching institution. The teaching attracted European partners. And the partners — Lions Club Switzerland, DBHW Duisburg, the German Embassy in Dhaka — turned a regional initiative into a 27-year unbroken record of care.
"We didn't plan to build an organisation. We planned to come back every week. Twenty-seven years later, that is the organisation."
CRUD is registered with the NGO Affairs Bureau of Bangladesh under No. 2770, audited annually, and operates today across Habiganj district with outreach into Sunamganj, Moulvibazar and the Rohingya camps of Cox's Bazar.