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The inaugural mission of Operation Smile to Malawi and on Thursday November 15 the 64 member team arrived in Lilongwe. Two days of screening of approximately 250 potential patients for surgery. Then a day of setting up the operating room, the wards, the record keeping tables, the photographic team in place and all ready to go on the Monday morning. Six operating tables and one after the other lip and/or palate transformed to what it was intended to be.
Read moreShe has never seen a white person, lives in Marjima two days walk from Kindu the capital of Maniema Province,in the East-central region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She is 56 years of age and wanted to look beautiful. But born with a bilateral cleft lip. She walked the two days from her home village in Marjima to Kindu where there is an airport. Relatives of her helped her onto the plane after an air ticket was purchased and she arrived in Kinshasa overwhelmed by all she experienced, seen, all that was happening to her.
Read moreWalking the streets of Addis Ababa finding strong Ethiopian coffee and a veg sandwich late afternoon still perturbed by so many beggars. A woman with little stumps for fingers stretched out towards me, another half curled under her blanket but a hand held in anticipation and thankful eyes as her hand closes over the Birr or two. But never ending.
Read moreGod created us to need people. And I became so acutely aware of this in these two weeks. A young woman of about 22 years came to the hospital in a desperate state a week before my arrival at Soddo Christian Hospital. She was dying. She had a tumour of the mandible (ameloblastoma) - a totally benign and curable tumour and certainly not the biggest we have seen by African standards. But it was slowly suffocating her.
Read moreMamadou prayed silently to himself, asking God for just one more ounce of courage as he waited alone at the Mercy Ships patient screening in Conakry, Guinea. Mamadou tried to blend in with the other adults, silently shifting from chair to chair as the line-up of patients advanced.
Read moreJohnson Mpika is an eleven year old boy from Pointe Noire, Republic of The Congo. But he is different from his friends. He is intelligent, more than the average for his age it would appear. He is friendly, loved by his grandpa who takes care of him. But he is deaf, mute and his face is scarred.
Read moreJean Bosco is a farmer. Years ago, Jean lost his taste for the chaos of the city, so he chose a simple life and the peace of open land. Nowadays, just north of Congo’s capital city of Brazzaville, you will find fields that bear the mark of Jean’s honest labor—hectares of cassava sway their umbrella leaves, gardens of eggplant and tomato bloom, and trees heavy with lime and mango cast shade under the sun.
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