84-year-old Gladys Khoza reacted with delight after she was one of 133 people who had their sight restored during a cataract eye surgery “marathon” conducted by doctors in South Africa at two hospitals over two weekends last month.

“Wow,” she whispered as a nurse peeled back the bandage over one eye a day after her operation and the world came back into view.

“Can you see me?” the nurse asked. “Very well,” Khoza replied, a big grin on her face.

Patients in South Africa's public health service can be on waiting lists for years for the relatively routine cataract operations, and officials said some of those who were helped by this initiative had been waiting since 2019 to see properly again.

Cataracts are a common and often age-related problem where the eye's lens becomes clouded.

The surgeries insert a new artificial lens.

For Khoza, who said she couldn't see anything out of one eye and had problems with the other, that simple surgery equates to a major boost for her quality of life in her later years.

“I just wanted to be able to see,” she told The Associated Press.

Now, after nearly a year waiting, some of her favorite things — really seeing family members, reading her bible, and watching daytime soap operas — are all possible again.

Dr. Tebogo Fakude, who was among a team of doctors who volunteered to perform the operations at two regional hospitals near Johannesburg, said his own mother was blind and enjoys what he does.

“We love to do what we do - to give sight," he said. "It's a small organ in the body, but it affects humongous things in the human body, or in the human lifestyle."

During the three-day surgery marathon at Pholosong Regional Hospital in South Africa, a new patient was brought into the operating theater about every hour.

Soothing gospel music played in the operating room to keep up the doctors' morale.

Looking through a microscope, the eye specialists made tiny incisions in the eye for each operation, removed the cloudy lens, and replaced it with an artificial one.

Outside the theatre, the patients wait nervously for their turn.

Globally, at least 2.2 billion people suffer from some kind of vision impairment, according to the World Health Organization.

Some 1 billion of them could have had the problems prevented or are still waiting for treatment.

Cataracts are one of the leading causes, with nearly 100 million people affected by cataracts and half of them still needing access to surgery, according to the WHO.

In Africa, that figure rises to 75% of people needing cataract surgery still being untreated, according to a study published in March by the journal The Lancet.

Surgery backlogs are a significant problem in South Africa, where government-run hospitals serve more than three-quarters of the population of 62 million people, and limited resources mean emergency procedures and serious operations are prioritized over elective surgery.

At the same time, around 300,000 new cataract cases are diagnosed every year in South Africa, Fakude said.

Health groups say South Africa faced a massive backlog of over 240,000 people waiting for cataract operations by the end of last year, and over 35,000 people in the most populous province of Gauteng — where the surgery marathon was performed — have cataract-related blindness.