13 years ago in Paris, Project IRIS was founded. I had been working in Cambodia since 1992. It was then a land devastated by conflict, brutality, genocide and pain. I arrived shortly after the United Nations troops had started to come in which followed on from the Paris Peace accord where the conflicting parties had agreed to put down arms and let in the UN as a transition government to organize elections. I went to Cambodia to work on an AMDA Japan project to assist setting up health services for repatriated refugees from the border camps. Working out of a shaky field clinic in fringe Khmer Rouges country (the Khmer Rouge had reneged on the Paris accord and not put down their weapons), we saw, among the vast array of sickness at Phnom Srouch many treatable eye conditions and that was my personal call to try sometime to do something about them. Cataract blindness is so relatively easy to treat, yet there was almost nowhere in the Cambodia at that time where the poor could get the operations they needed.

Michele Claudel, a generous Swiss philanthopist a friend of a medical colleague of mine, Dr Francois Lette who had also come to Cambodia with AMDA had visited Cambodia during this time and sponsored several Cambodian students to go to France for advanced training in Tropical Medicine. This wonderful educational initiative of hers was something hugely needed by the country. We had become friends and we decided that we should initiate an eye project. She arranged the meeting in Paris and introduced me at the time to the third of we three IRIS founders, John Stewart.

There was then a period of yo-yo'ing back and forward to Cambodia both for Michele and I, setting up infrastructure etc. The key to it all happening though was through my informal AMDA connections with AMDA Nepal, a wonderful and very organized medical organization and part of the AMDA world network. The level of expertise in Nepal developing country eye surgery was wonderful, yet there had been virtually no contacts between the Nepal and Cambodian systems. My good friend there Dr Bal Kumar Katri Chetri ('Dr KC') introduced me to Dr Basant Raj Sharma (now one of Rose Charities most experienced consultants and advisors),of Lumbini Eye hospital, the run by SEVA, who advised on our purchase of equipment and logisitcs. We decided that the 'eye camp' approach would be the most fruitful, to try to get out to the almost medieval conditions in the countryside and take the operations to where they were most needed. Without the Nepal input, and specifically that of Dr Basant, who supervised and operated at the first (and many others later) IRIS eye camp, IRIS simply would not have happened. In that sense, Dr Basant can be considered is the true founder of both both IRIS and Rose (which evolved from IRIS)

John Stewart, one of we three IRIS directors, also a talented writer and documentary maker generously made and donated this film (part shown here..for more see www.RoseCharities.org ) for IRIS promotion. John was initially a board member of Rose Charities Canada after Rose Division of IRIS became its own organization. Both John and Michele can be considered two amongst the most important founders of Rose Charities as, without their agreement, the Rose division would not have been separated from IRIS. IRIS continues to this day, expanded and carrying out wonderful work in its almost exclusive focus of ophthalmology. In 2004 the Rose Charities Eye clinic, then fully re-equipped after a terrible looting some 2years earlier by a crooked expatriate , was offered to IRIS Cambodia to be run by them or as in a joint collaboration. The offer was graciously declined. Will Grut