BACKGROUND AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS li blindness. One of the most important contributions to the survey was a grant of approximately $25,000 from the Seva Foundation to pay for physicians' salaries, medical equipment, and pharmaceuticals to be used to provide direct medical care to residents of the surveyed villages. Seven young Nepalese physicians performed admirably the task of administering medicine for a wide variety of illnesses as well as assisting the ophthalmologists and the survey team, often acting as team managers, epidemiologists, and occasionally helicopter co-pilots! These physicians included Drs. G. P. Pokhrel, P. C. Karmacharya, Kapil Upadhyaya, S. Ruhit, P. R. Thebe, K. B. Khadka, and S. B. Shrestha. At the village or site level, teams of enumerators and ophthalmic assistants first visited each site to do a careful census and prepare the sites for the clinical teams that followed. These young enumerators often had a difficult assignment in harsh field conditions, trekking as much as 25 or 50 hours each way to reach a sur- vey site. Several also worked in Kathmandu to check, recheck, and code the questionnaires when they returned from the field, checking each form for accuracy and completeness. The tables in this volume, showing the many different types of information about households and villages, are the result of more than 30,000 hours of work by these teams, which included Tara Kumar Subba, Dhanaraj Angdembe, Purushettam Bhandari, Aparajit Shrestha, Ashok Upreti, Narayan Acharya, Dharama Bahadur Dongol, Madhukar Basnet, Lekhnath Sharma, Basanta Raj Nepal, Rajendra Bahadur Malla, Dharma Raj Bhandari, Raj Ghale, Rajeshwor Thapa, Tika Ram Rai, Sunil Raj Dahal, Pashupati Parajuli, Dharma Lal Shrestha, Dig Bijaya Dhakal, Dillil Bikram Basnet., Ram Prasad Subedi, Sameer Silwal, Bhagirath Manandhar, S. K. Adhikari, Hari Krishna Ghimire, Om Kar Ghimire, Taj Bahadur, Poorna Singh, Bimal Kumar Poudyal, Hari Govinda Shrestha, Bishnuman Maleku, Ram Krishna Maharjan, and Thakur Baral. During the data management phase, a number of other expert consultants provided essential help. Mr. V.R. Dhakwa, helped develop the data management system, and Ms. Jeannie Kuo visited Kathmandu from The University of Michigan's Survey Research Center to help develop the overall data management plan, write computer checking programs, organize the codebooks, and make plans for the smooth transition to The University of Michigan com- puter system where the final analysis was to be carried out. Later, in Michigan, Jeannie became the guardian of the dataset. Without Jeannie's tireless efforts this report could not have been done. I would like to thank the many others in Kathmandu and in the
