[12] During the five years in Farson, Rambo and the family planted crops and raised chickens for food, often struggling to produce enough for all members of the household.

[13] He soon got a more permanent job driving a Fresno scraper, a metal basket that dumped dirt into an irrigation ditch, but was subsequently fired after he joined a group of workers protesting the wage.

He then worked as an orderly in the local hospital and caught the attention of the resident doctor, who began to teach him common procedures such as catheterization.

[15] In March 1914, the family moved again to Chehalis, Washington, where Rambo remained until September 1915, graduating from high school at the age of twenty-one.

[21] In June, Rambo was ordained as a minister in the Church of Christ and in August, he was made a diplomate of the National Board of Medical Examiners.

[24] Knowledge of Hindi was a requisite for missionary work in India, so in March, the Rambos moved to Landour to study the language further.

[28] The Mungeli mission station was located on one side of the Agar River and the town on the other, and soon, Rambo started work at the local hospital.

[29] He worked at the hospital with Hira Lal, an Indian man who had learned to deliver children, hold clinics, and treat malaria and other diseases from former missionaries, despite having no medical degree of his own.

[35] The hospital was remodeled to include an outpatient department, lab, and records room and several new wards after it accepted a substantial donation from a supporter back in the United States.

[2] Prime Minister Indira Gandhi provided Rambo with equipment and instruments worth over 10,000 dollars, and Oxfam donated additional supplies.

Rambo was aware that for many years, people in the region had relied on "couchers," men who traveled with broken razor blades and performed relatively painless eye surgeries on partially blind patients.

[38] He was initially hesitant to perform more surgeries, having had limited experience in ophthalmology, but began to treat more patients after a large number of blind individuals approached him for operations.

[2] Rambo thought of the idea of an "eye camp" after speaking with a patient who suggested that he come to the villages to perform operations, because he knew many individuals who had lost their vision and could not make the journey out to the distant mission hospital.

[41] Determined to mitigate the blindness problem in India, Rambo held the first official eye camp in March 1943 in Kawardha, an area forty-five miles away from Mungeli.

[41] There was an adequately equipped hospital in the area with about eight clean beds, and Rambo was able to perform ninety-five successful operations that day, most of them for cataract removal.

[42] Camps were held during the winter months in churches, schoolhouses, temples, and other large buildings, and the doctors used slit-lamp microscopes and instruments kept in boxes to prevent contamination.

[35] Rambo taught both undergraduate and graduate medical and nursing classes and encouraged students to watch and participate in his surgeries.

[44] The teams at Vellore, Sompeta, Mungeli, and Ludhiana completed more than fourteen thousand eye operations, despite India's increased fighting with Pakistan in 1969.

[3] Rambo received many awards for his work, including the Gold Kaisar-i-Hind Medal from King George VI in 1941 for exceptional public service.