Several years ago while trekking in a very remote valley high in the Peruvian Andes I came across a Quechua family with a four year old girl who bore a faint scar on her upper lip. A scar very recognizable to me as a cleft lip that had been surgically repaired. The family insisted that I spend the night with them in their one room stone hut. They made every attempt to treat me like royalty. When I inquired about the scar they told me that American doctors had come to their country and had fixed the terrible deformity their daughter had been born with. They couldn't thank me enough.

A little over a year ago I was asked by Interplast if I would help create a book that would illustrate the work they performed on children with facial deformities who lived in remote areas around the world. The project called to me in several ways. First I had traveled to many of the areas they served. And secondly, as an orthodontist I had worked in conjunction with oral and plastic surgeons to treat patients with cleft palate deformities in my practice for over 18yrs. In that time I never saw a patient with an unoperated cleft lip. In the developed world infants seldom leave the hospital before having the cleft lip corrected. Not so in other parts of the world where this abnormality often remains uncorrected into adulthood and throughout life.

From a small child's perspective, a cleft is neutral, however there comes a day when that outward disfigurement begins to disfigure the spirit and psyche as well. This pain of image, reputation and selfworth transcends culture. In Vietnam it is believed that if a pregnant woman just looks at someone with a cleft her unborn baby will "catch the affliction." In Peru, a baby born with a congenital facial abnormality is considered to be the result of a previous sin of the mother.

They explained how Interplast came into being 30 years ago after a plastic surgeon met Antonio, a 14 year old boy in Mexico who had been born with a cleft lip and palate. Since medical help was not available in Antonio's village he was relegated to living with his deformity. He not only had difficulty speaking and eating but he also lived in shame and isolation because of the superstitions of his fellow villagers. Antonio had never attended school, had no friends his age and had little hope of ever finding work as he grew older. He was sentenced to a life of despair simply due to the fact he couldn't get a relatively simple surgical procedure that is done routinely in the developed countries of the world.

What began as a single operation for Antonio has grown into an organization that sends volunteer medical teams to remote areas all over the world providing over 3,000 free surgeries annually for children and adults with disfiguring facial deformities. More importantly the volunteer medical teams help train the local doctors to perform the surgical procedures that were previously unavailable in their area.

When I first began planing how I could approach the book my initial idea was to demonstrate the extraordinary contribution Interplast was making by carefully documenting the patients before and after their surgeries. It was with this in mind that I decided to accompany two separate Interplast teams into Peru and Vietnam.

The experience was overwhelming -- the crowds at the little clinics that greeted us with applause; the parents and children with gratitude and hope pouring from their eyes; faces of children and adults carrying deformities rarely seen publicly in our country. Wave after wave of emotion swept over me.

Although most of the 17 member Interplast team were strangers to each other before arriving at their destination, watching them pull together and perform was inspiring. Like the time in Peru when the supplies were held up in customs for several days. To make up for the lost time everyone pitched in and worked 18 hour days to serve the 216 patients -- many of whom had traveled days in hope of getting help.

I got to know many of the volunteers in the two teams over the course of the two trips. After several long talks with them, I began to learn that the remarkable changes they were bringing about in the faces of the people they served were accompanied by equally dramatic life changing shifts in the values, attitudes and beliefs of the volunteers themselves. The gift to their patients became an unexpected gift for themselves.

Isabel's Story >>