Smile Train's Notes
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We are a registered charity in Canada! At this time you may make donations through Canada Helps http://...com/STCanada
On Friday July 31st, 65 classic and sports car owners took to the winding roads of the Kettle Moraine State Forest for the first annual "Kettle Call Rally" in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. The event started and ended from the historic Siebken's Resort in downtown Elkhart Lake and utilized some of the historic roads utilized from the 1950's Road Races that made the small Wisconsin town world famous. Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches and more (and their enthusiastic owners) converged for a wonderful afternoon of sportsmanship, sponsored by International Maserati of Waukesha and Project Two Customs of Waukesha, with proceeds benefiting SmileTrain.org.
The Smile Train lost a very good friend when Walter Cronkite passed away recently.
10 years ago when we started The Smile Train, Walter was one of the very first to get on board.
Many years ago I remember vividly meeting with him for the first time in his office and talking about what we were trying to do.
Always the reporter, he started quizzing me about what causes clefts, where are they most prevalent, why can’t a cure be found that would prevent them, etc. He was in his 80s at this point but he was sharp as a tack. I was kind of surprised at how interested he was in what we were doing and even more so at how much he wanted to help us.
When I explained to him how tragic it was that there were millions of children with unrepaired clefts in developing countries who were not being helped solely because they were too poor to afford surgery, he said it was a “Story that was almost too sad to tell.”
After watching videos of children with clefts that I had brought along, he shook his head and said it was “just heartbreaking.”
As I sat there speaking with him I looked around his office and saw photos, newspaper front pages and headlines of many of the biggest events that have happened in America and the world over the past 50 years. Walter was front and center at each and every one of them: JFK’s assassination, man on the moon, Vietnam, Watergate, The Berlin Wall, etc. I felt like I was in a museum and sitting across the desk from an American Institution.
When Walter agreed to appear in our very first Smile Train video, we were so honored and excited to have "the most trusted man in America" helping us. (If you want to see the video he did for us, go to our videos on facebook or go to our website: http://www.smiletrain.org/
And help us he did, in many ways, for more than 10 years.
Altogether, Walter Cronkite helped us provide free cleft surgery for more than 524,000 children who would otherwise never have received it.
And a few months ago when our documentary Smile Pinki won an Oscar, one of the first emails we received was from Walter congratulating us and saying how proud he was to have helped us launch The Smile Train.
He was a great man.
And we will miss him.
Brian
10 years ago when we started The Smile Train, Walter was one of the very first to get on board.
Many years ago I remember vividly meeting with him for the first time in his office and talking about what we were trying to do.
Always the reporter, he started quizzing me about what causes clefts, where are they most prevalent, why can’t a cure be found that would prevent them, etc. He was in his 80s at this point but he was sharp as a tack. I was kind of surprised at how interested he was in what we were doing and even more so at how much he wanted to help us.
When I explained to him how tragic it was that there were millions of children with unrepaired clefts in developing countries who were not being helped solely because they were too poor to afford surgery, he said it was a “Story that was almost too sad to tell.”
After watching videos of children with clefts that I had brought along, he shook his head and said it was “just heartbreaking.”
As I sat there speaking with him I looked around his office and saw photos, newspaper front pages and headlines of many of the biggest events that have happened in America and the world over the past 50 years. Walter was front and center at each and every one of them: JFK’s assassination, man on the moon, Vietnam, Watergate, The Berlin Wall, etc. I felt like I was in a museum and sitting across the desk from an American Institution.
When Walter agreed to appear in our very first Smile Train video, we were so honored and excited to have "the most trusted man in America" helping us. (If you want to see the video he did for us, go to our videos on facebook or go to our website: http://www.smiletrain.org/
And help us he did, in many ways, for more than 10 years.
Altogether, Walter Cronkite helped us provide free cleft surgery for more than 524,000 children who would otherwise never have received it.
And a few months ago when our documentary Smile Pinki won an Oscar, one of the first emails we received was from Walter congratulating us and saying how proud he was to have helped us launch The Smile Train.
He was a great man.
And we will miss him.
Brian
The documentary filmmaker Megan Mylan has much to smile about. Her 39-minute film “Smile Pinki,” about a group of children in a rural Indian village with cleft lips who get a life-changing operation t...
We are pleased to introduce you to 5-year-old Shiv Ram. Smile Train partner surgeon Dr. Subodh Kumar Singh operated on Shiv on September 4th at Smile Train partner hospital G.S. Memorial Hospital in Varanasi, India. As you can see, the surgery went very well. Shiv’s new smile is just a symbol of a brand new life he has been given thanks to you and other generous donors who support us. He is lucky he only suffered for 5 years – many of the children we help wait 10, 15, 20 years or longer till we come along and help them. And of course, there are many for whom help never comes.
There are thousands of children just like Shiv who live in one of the poorest areas in the world. Shiv’s parents could NEVER afford the simple surgery that changed his life. When we visited this hospital there were more than 600 children with unrepaired clefts at the entrance begging for help. Some had come from hundreds of miles away.
Thank you for helping us help these kids.
There are thousands of children just like Shiv who live in one of the poorest areas in the world. Shiv’s parents could NEVER afford the simple surgery that changed his life. When we visited this hospital there were more than 600 children with unrepaired clefts at the entrance begging for help. Some had come from hundreds of miles away.
Thank you for helping us help these kids.
Sinel Rin is a 5-month-old girl that lives in one of the poorest areas of one of the world’s poorest countries. One out of 8 children in Cambodia doesn’t make it to their 5th birthday. Most of those who do survive face very difficult lives in a country that has more landmines than it does people and an average income per capita of $290 per year (that’s 79 cents a day!).
Sinel’s parents could save their entire lives and still never be able to afford the surgery that you helped make possible. One of our best surgeons, Dr. Long Vanna, operated on Sinel this past July 7th at the National Pediatric Hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. As you can see, the surgery went very well. Thankfully, this little girl will never know how painful and difficult her life would have been if she had to live it with an unrepaired cleft.
Thanks again for helping us help these kids.
Sinel’s parents could save their entire lives and still never be able to afford the surgery that you helped make possible. One of our best surgeons, Dr. Long Vanna, operated on Sinel this past July 7th at the National Pediatric Hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. As you can see, the surgery went very well. Thankfully, this little girl will never know how painful and difficult her life would have been if she had to live it with an unrepaired cleft.
Thanks again for helping us help these kids.
Dear Friends,
Just got back from Mumbai, India. I wanted to let you know how we’re using your donations in one of
the poorest places on our planet. India is a very complicated country with many contradictions. It has tremendous wealth – and at the same time tremendous poverty and suffering.
There are more than a few billionaires here. At the same time, 85,000 farmers in India have committed suicide over the past 5 years because of financial hardship and the shame of not being able to come up with a $100 dowry to marry off their daughters.
We spent our first day in Dharavi; it’s one of Asia’s largest slums. They use the word slum,
but to be honest, it felt like an enormous garbage dump. More than one million people live in extreme poverty here and the majority of them survive by foraging through the garbage both for food and for items they can sell and recycle. I have never experienced anything like it.
Believe it or not, these poor people have to pay rent in this slum which is $4 a month. Sounds like nothing but when you make 10 or 20 cents a day, it can be a lot. (The average American earns about
$40,000 a year, or about $110 a day.)
Some of the sweatshop and factory owners actually convince parents that their children will gain skills and have better lives if they work away from home. But usually by the time the children finish their long commitments to these employers, they’ve fallen too far behind to resume going to school.
On this trip to Mumbai and around India, we met literally hundreds of children who we had operated on –
and those that were preparing to undergo surgery.
This part is always my favorite part of these trips, meeting a lot of kids and their parents.
I am including some pictures that I took. Please notice the faces of the parents with their children AFTER they have surgery and BEFORE they have surgery. The faces of the parents show a bigger change than the children sometimes!
BEFORE surgery the parents are worried, skeptical, stressed out, sometimes angry looking. Often they have traveled for weeks to get to our hospital, sometimes they have spent their last dime to get here. When they arrive and find hundreds of other kids that have clefts too, they are terrified that their child
will not be chosen for surgery. They are worried that it is a trick and that the surgery isn’t really free. The stress, the pain, the worry shows on their faces even more than their children.
Now look at the parents faces AFTER their children have been helped! See how relieved they are, relaxed, happy, and thankful. At one of our hospitals I literally shook the hands and took pictures of more than 150 children and their parents! It was 90 degrees and I was completely drenched but it was worth it. One man broke down in tears as he told us just how much this surgery meant to his only son and he and his wife. Another woman tried to throw herself at my feet – I picked her up of course – to thank me for helping her baby girl. It was very emotional, very intense.
Every little hand I shook, every parent I met, every baby I got to pick up and hug was another little reminder how The Smile Train is changing somany lives in so many ways. Ten years ago, a few of us left America’s biggest mission group because it was turning away hundreds of children on every mission. It was heartbreaking. We decided we had to find a better way and help more kids for less money.
Ten years later I can tell you we have found a better way. A much better way: cheaper, faster, safer, smarter. Our cost-per-surgery is 90% less than mission groups. And over ten years, we’ve
provided hundreds of thousands of free surgeries for children that would otherwise never be helped.
Along the way, we have never, ever turned away a single child that needed help. Not one.
I wish that you could have stood with me in that line, meeting these kids and their parents. And I would have liked to have seen the expression on your face too. The trip home was long and exhausting, 27 hours of straight travel, but my smile lasted the whole way. And I am smiling now as I look at these photos while I write this letter to thank you for all of your help and support.
We saw people doing just unbelievable things to make a buck as we walked around: pounding at old computer keyboards with screwdrivers to remove the keys, salvaging covers of old PC monitors, men using knives to strip away by hand the insulation and rubber coating of wires and cables, hundreds of women sorting millions of filthy McDonald’s plastic cup covers.
It was strange in that even though this was a slum, everyone we saw was working extremely hard. Nobody was just sitting around. And we never felt unsafe or threatened which was remarkable. (I am writing this at night and tomorrow morning I have to go into one of New York’s largest slums. We will be escorted by 2 policemen.) There was a huge water main leading into the slum but other than that there was no basic infrastructure, facilities for sanitation or electricity. The shortage of toilets is a massive problem that creates major health problems. In Dharavi, there is one toilet for every 1,440 people!
Many children start school in Dharavi, but few of them finish. We actually visited a school which had a playground filled with – you guessed it, trash and garbage. And we came across another playground
with a bunch of kids playing cricket on a field of – trash and garbage.
While we walked through this slum for a couple hours we saw many children scurrying along carrying water or working in these sweatshops, tanneries, garbage sorting businesses, etc. Hiring children under the age of 14 is supposed to be illegal, but I can imagine that is hard to enforce when people are living on the brink of starvation and there is so much hardship and suffering. Often it is easier for the children in the family to get jobs than the father and their labor and income can be crucial to a slum family’s survival.
I certainly wouldn’t have been standing there without your support. And none of those children would have been helped without donors like you. We never forget that our donors are what make The Smile Train possible. If you have sent us a donation recently, I thank you. I hope this report makes you glad you did. If you haven’t sent us anything recently, will you please consider it? The economic catastrophe has hit us harder than the car companies. (You need a car to go to work – nobody needs to send any money to charity.) Our donations are down almost 22% while the number of kids showing up at
our hospitals is up more than 50%. As always, any donation you send us – of any amount – will be restricted 100% towards programs. And I’ll send you not only our heartfelt thanks but a before and after picture of a kid we were able to help. You can put it up on your fridge as a reminder that somewhere in the world, a little kid is smiling today thanks to you.
Thanks for reading my long letter – and thanks for helping us too.
Brian
Co-Founder/President
P.S. Our documentary Smile Pinki was nominated for an Academy
Award! You can see a preview at www.SmileTrain.org.
P.P.S. Any advice, criticism, suggestions, ideas, or feedback is always
welcome and appreciated. E-mail me directly at brian@SmileTrain.org.
Just got back from Mumbai, India. I wanted to let you know how we’re using your donations in one of
the poorest places on our planet. India is a very complicated country with many contradictions. It has tremendous wealth – and at the same time tremendous poverty and suffering.
There are more than a few billionaires here. At the same time, 85,000 farmers in India have committed suicide over the past 5 years because of financial hardship and the shame of not being able to come up with a $100 dowry to marry off their daughters.
We spent our first day in Dharavi; it’s one of Asia’s largest slums. They use the word slum,
but to be honest, it felt like an enormous garbage dump. More than one million people live in extreme poverty here and the majority of them survive by foraging through the garbage both for food and for items they can sell and recycle. I have never experienced anything like it.
Believe it or not, these poor people have to pay rent in this slum which is $4 a month. Sounds like nothing but when you make 10 or 20 cents a day, it can be a lot. (The average American earns about
$40,000 a year, or about $110 a day.)
Some of the sweatshop and factory owners actually convince parents that their children will gain skills and have better lives if they work away from home. But usually by the time the children finish their long commitments to these employers, they’ve fallen too far behind to resume going to school.
On this trip to Mumbai and around India, we met literally hundreds of children who we had operated on –
and those that were preparing to undergo surgery.
This part is always my favorite part of these trips, meeting a lot of kids and their parents.
I am including some pictures that I took. Please notice the faces of the parents with their children AFTER they have surgery and BEFORE they have surgery. The faces of the parents show a bigger change than the children sometimes!
BEFORE surgery the parents are worried, skeptical, stressed out, sometimes angry looking. Often they have traveled for weeks to get to our hospital, sometimes they have spent their last dime to get here. When they arrive and find hundreds of other kids that have clefts too, they are terrified that their child
will not be chosen for surgery. They are worried that it is a trick and that the surgery isn’t really free. The stress, the pain, the worry shows on their faces even more than their children.
Now look at the parents faces AFTER their children have been helped! See how relieved they are, relaxed, happy, and thankful. At one of our hospitals I literally shook the hands and took pictures of more than 150 children and their parents! It was 90 degrees and I was completely drenched but it was worth it. One man broke down in tears as he told us just how much this surgery meant to his only son and he and his wife. Another woman tried to throw herself at my feet – I picked her up of course – to thank me for helping her baby girl. It was very emotional, very intense.
Every little hand I shook, every parent I met, every baby I got to pick up and hug was another little reminder how The Smile Train is changing somany lives in so many ways. Ten years ago, a few of us left America’s biggest mission group because it was turning away hundreds of children on every mission. It was heartbreaking. We decided we had to find a better way and help more kids for less money.
Ten years later I can tell you we have found a better way. A much better way: cheaper, faster, safer, smarter. Our cost-per-surgery is 90% less than mission groups. And over ten years, we’ve
provided hundreds of thousands of free surgeries for children that would otherwise never be helped.
Along the way, we have never, ever turned away a single child that needed help. Not one.
I wish that you could have stood with me in that line, meeting these kids and their parents. And I would have liked to have seen the expression on your face too. The trip home was long and exhausting, 27 hours of straight travel, but my smile lasted the whole way. And I am smiling now as I look at these photos while I write this letter to thank you for all of your help and support.
We saw people doing just unbelievable things to make a buck as we walked around: pounding at old computer keyboards with screwdrivers to remove the keys, salvaging covers of old PC monitors, men using knives to strip away by hand the insulation and rubber coating of wires and cables, hundreds of women sorting millions of filthy McDonald’s plastic cup covers.
It was strange in that even though this was a slum, everyone we saw was working extremely hard. Nobody was just sitting around. And we never felt unsafe or threatened which was remarkable. (I am writing this at night and tomorrow morning I have to go into one of New York’s largest slums. We will be escorted by 2 policemen.) There was a huge water main leading into the slum but other than that there was no basic infrastructure, facilities for sanitation or electricity. The shortage of toilets is a massive problem that creates major health problems. In Dharavi, there is one toilet for every 1,440 people!
Many children start school in Dharavi, but few of them finish. We actually visited a school which had a playground filled with – you guessed it, trash and garbage. And we came across another playground
with a bunch of kids playing cricket on a field of – trash and garbage.
While we walked through this slum for a couple hours we saw many children scurrying along carrying water or working in these sweatshops, tanneries, garbage sorting businesses, etc. Hiring children under the age of 14 is supposed to be illegal, but I can imagine that is hard to enforce when people are living on the brink of starvation and there is so much hardship and suffering. Often it is easier for the children in the family to get jobs than the father and their labor and income can be crucial to a slum family’s survival.
I certainly wouldn’t have been standing there without your support. And none of those children would have been helped without donors like you. We never forget that our donors are what make The Smile Train possible. If you have sent us a donation recently, I thank you. I hope this report makes you glad you did. If you haven’t sent us anything recently, will you please consider it? The economic catastrophe has hit us harder than the car companies. (You need a car to go to work – nobody needs to send any money to charity.) Our donations are down almost 22% while the number of kids showing up at
our hospitals is up more than 50%. As always, any donation you send us – of any amount – will be restricted 100% towards programs. And I’ll send you not only our heartfelt thanks but a before and after picture of a kid we were able to help. You can put it up on your fridge as a reminder that somewhere in the world, a little kid is smiling today thanks to you.
Thanks for reading my long letter – and thanks for helping us too.
Brian
Co-Founder/President
P.S. Our documentary Smile Pinki was nominated for an Academy
Award! You can see a preview at www.SmileTrain.org.
P.P.S. Any advice, criticism, suggestions, ideas, or feedback is always
welcome and appreciated. E-mail me directly at brian@SmileTrain.org.
Dear Friend,
We recently sent Smile Train surgeons to southern Iraq, and I thought you might like to see how your donations are changing lives in this dangerous and desperate place. It all started with an e-mail we received from a U.S. Army sergeant a few years ago. He told us that every day Iraqis would show up at his checkpoint with sick and injured children begging for help. He said the policy was “life, sight or limb” – if the child was about to lose one of these, then they would admit the child and try to help him or her. For every other problem, the child and parent were turned away. After turning away hundreds of parents who had shown up with children with horrible clefts, the sergeant looked up clefts on the Internet and found us. He asked us if we would be willing to help children with clefts in Iraq. “Of course,” we said, without hesitation. And although it was much more complicated, difficult and took longer (years!) than we could ever have imagined, our first Smile Train mission finally happened in Iraq and it was a big success.
The mother of a little 7-month-old girl named Duha, from Nasiriyah, was so visibly shaken and overjoyed upon seeing her daughter after surgery, she hugged Fabio and thanked him. With tears in her eyes, she told him something he said he will never forget. “I believe there is a heaven, and I will gladly give you my place in heaven to thank you for what you have done for my daughter.” Salvatore, an Italian nurse and father of two who was part of the visiting surgical team wrote, (translated from Italian):
Probably someone will ask why Westerners are risking their lives to help these children? They are beautiful. Their eyes, though sad, are beautiful. They quickly understand that we are here to help them. Their parents affectionately greet us. These children are suffering from a disease that is easy to heal, but that without our help, could mean death (in some countries being born with cleft is synonymous with death) because these children are considered monsters, demons. Stupid ignorance! The days pass quickly. We worked tirelessly, from dawn till night. I am exhausted but happy. When I watch these tiny miracles happen it makes me smile. I feel like laughing with joy. The angels now have the wings and we smile as we walk away. Now I want to go home and see my children. This morning, back at my usual job, wearing my usual smile, but it is not the same. I am not the same. Maybe I am at a turning point in my life.
I am lucky, my children can go to school without worrying that a bomb will kill them. I am lucky because every day I don’t pass by children without legs or arms, torn by bombs hidden in the sand, lives ruined by men who are so evil and violent. I am lucky because I know that there is someone who loves me and believes in me. I have only my life, to continue to help those less fortunate than I. I am lucky because I have two sons and a family that love me.” Will we go back to Iraq? We must! This year, almost 1,000 new babies with clefts will be born in Iraq. This will increase the existing backlog of at least 20,000+ children in Iraq who are walking around with unrepaired clefts. Iraqi surgeon Dr. Ali Abbas Nasser is going to take the lead and coordinate future missions and help establish the telemedicine equipment that we brought with us. Our goal is to ramp up to 1,000 surgeries a year, so that at least we can keep the backlog from getting any bigger. This will not be easy, but we and our Iraqi partner surgeons are determined and committed.
And Fabio, our tireless hero Fabio, is already planning the next mission. This historic mission was led by one of our best surgeons, Dr. Fabio Abenavoli, from Rome, Italy. Fabio is a fearless humanitarian and excellent cleft surgeon who will go anywhere there are children who need help. Over the past couple of years, Fabio has led missions to Iraq, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Pakistan, Tanzania, Uganda and Armenia. In case you are wondering why we are sending a traditional medical mission to Iraq instead of empowering local surgeons as we usually do, let me explain. We actually do currently support more than six Iraqi cleft surgeons who do the best they can under impossible circumstances. But things are so bad, the medical infrastructure has been so decimated and conditions are so dangerous for doctors, that in order to help a large number of children, we had to not only bring in a team of surgeons and nurses, we had to bring in a state-of-the-art mobile operating unit as well in which to perform the surgeries.
In this amazing mobile operating theater at Camp Mittica in southern Iraq, Fabio and his team, working side by side with Iraqi surgeons and nurses, changed the lives of 66 very lucky Iraqi children and their families. During the mission, 15 Iraqi surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses were also trained. If you have recently sent us a donation, I thank you and hope this report from the field makes you glad you did. Iraq is just one of 75 of the world’s poorest countries where we are using your support to help children nobody else will help. If you haven’t sent us a donation in a while, will you please consider it? With the economy tanking and gas prices soaring while house values plummet, raising money is getting harder and harder. Our response rates are down 20% from last year, while the number of children showing up at our hospitals begging for help is up 25%. Hopefully, with continued support from folks like you, we can continue our record of never having to turn any child away. Fingers crossed.
Brian
Co-Founder/President
P.S. If you’d like to see more photos – and great videos – of children you have helped change, visit us at www.SmileTrain.org.
We recently sent Smile Train surgeons to southern Iraq, and I thought you might like to see how your donations are changing lives in this dangerous and desperate place. It all started with an e-mail we received from a U.S. Army sergeant a few years ago. He told us that every day Iraqis would show up at his checkpoint with sick and injured children begging for help. He said the policy was “life, sight or limb” – if the child was about to lose one of these, then they would admit the child and try to help him or her. For every other problem, the child and parent were turned away. After turning away hundreds of parents who had shown up with children with horrible clefts, the sergeant looked up clefts on the Internet and found us. He asked us if we would be willing to help children with clefts in Iraq. “Of course,” we said, without hesitation. And although it was much more complicated, difficult and took longer (years!) than we could ever have imagined, our first Smile Train mission finally happened in Iraq and it was a big success.
The mother of a little 7-month-old girl named Duha, from Nasiriyah, was so visibly shaken and overjoyed upon seeing her daughter after surgery, she hugged Fabio and thanked him. With tears in her eyes, she told him something he said he will never forget. “I believe there is a heaven, and I will gladly give you my place in heaven to thank you for what you have done for my daughter.” Salvatore, an Italian nurse and father of two who was part of the visiting surgical team wrote, (translated from Italian):
Probably someone will ask why Westerners are risking their lives to help these children? They are beautiful. Their eyes, though sad, are beautiful. They quickly understand that we are here to help them. Their parents affectionately greet us. These children are suffering from a disease that is easy to heal, but that without our help, could mean death (in some countries being born with cleft is synonymous with death) because these children are considered monsters, demons. Stupid ignorance! The days pass quickly. We worked tirelessly, from dawn till night. I am exhausted but happy. When I watch these tiny miracles happen it makes me smile. I feel like laughing with joy. The angels now have the wings and we smile as we walk away. Now I want to go home and see my children. This morning, back at my usual job, wearing my usual smile, but it is not the same. I am not the same. Maybe I am at a turning point in my life.
I am lucky, my children can go to school without worrying that a bomb will kill them. I am lucky because every day I don’t pass by children without legs or arms, torn by bombs hidden in the sand, lives ruined by men who are so evil and violent. I am lucky because I know that there is someone who loves me and believes in me. I have only my life, to continue to help those less fortunate than I. I am lucky because I have two sons and a family that love me.” Will we go back to Iraq? We must! This year, almost 1,000 new babies with clefts will be born in Iraq. This will increase the existing backlog of at least 20,000+ children in Iraq who are walking around with unrepaired clefts. Iraqi surgeon Dr. Ali Abbas Nasser is going to take the lead and coordinate future missions and help establish the telemedicine equipment that we brought with us. Our goal is to ramp up to 1,000 surgeries a year, so that at least we can keep the backlog from getting any bigger. This will not be easy, but we and our Iraqi partner surgeons are determined and committed.
And Fabio, our tireless hero Fabio, is already planning the next mission. This historic mission was led by one of our best surgeons, Dr. Fabio Abenavoli, from Rome, Italy. Fabio is a fearless humanitarian and excellent cleft surgeon who will go anywhere there are children who need help. Over the past couple of years, Fabio has led missions to Iraq, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Pakistan, Tanzania, Uganda and Armenia. In case you are wondering why we are sending a traditional medical mission to Iraq instead of empowering local surgeons as we usually do, let me explain. We actually do currently support more than six Iraqi cleft surgeons who do the best they can under impossible circumstances. But things are so bad, the medical infrastructure has been so decimated and conditions are so dangerous for doctors, that in order to help a large number of children, we had to not only bring in a team of surgeons and nurses, we had to bring in a state-of-the-art mobile operating unit as well in which to perform the surgeries.
In this amazing mobile operating theater at Camp Mittica in southern Iraq, Fabio and his team, working side by side with Iraqi surgeons and nurses, changed the lives of 66 very lucky Iraqi children and their families. During the mission, 15 Iraqi surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses were also trained. If you have recently sent us a donation, I thank you and hope this report from the field makes you glad you did. Iraq is just one of 75 of the world’s poorest countries where we are using your support to help children nobody else will help. If you haven’t sent us a donation in a while, will you please consider it? With the economy tanking and gas prices soaring while house values plummet, raising money is getting harder and harder. Our response rates are down 20% from last year, while the number of children showing up at our hospitals begging for help is up 25%. Hopefully, with continued support from folks like you, we can continue our record of never having to turn any child away. Fingers crossed.
Brian
Co-Founder/President
P.S. If you’d like to see more photos – and great videos – of children you have helped change, visit us at www.SmileTrain.org.
We recently sent Smile Train surgeons to southern Iraq, and I thought you might like to see how your donations are changing lives in this dangerous and desperate place.
We recently sent Smile Train surgeons to southern Iraq, and I thought you might like to see how your donations are changing lives in this dangerous and desperate place.
We recently sent Smile Train surgeons to southern Iraq, and I thought you might like to see how your donations are changing lives in this dangerous and desperate place.
Dear Friend,
I just returned from a field trip to Haiti and I thought you might like to see how your donations are making a difference in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Over the past 15 years I've traveled to some awful places. Inner Mongolia where people are so poor they're living in caves. Northern Uganda where the average life expectancy is 42 years. Tribal areas in India where day laborers make 17 cents a day and farmers commit suicide because they can't raise a $100 dowry to marry their daughter. Bangladesh where I saw 3-year-olds begging in rush hour traffic. I thought I knew what extreme poverty was. I was wrong.
My recent trip to Haiti was one of the most depressing and shocking trips I have
ever taken. Two hours off the coast of the world's richest country, 9 million men, women and children are living amidst absolute squalor and desperation.
In spite of all of this poverty and squalor, as we walked through these slums, we were met with friendly faces and smiling children. We saw, met, joked with, touched and held hundreds of kids during our neighborhood walks." Most of them had no shoes, shirts, etc. Some had no clothes at all. We showed the kids pictures of themselves which always drew gasps of astonishment. Most had never seen pictures of themselves. They laughed and giggled like kids everywhere do. Many of them had beautiful smiles and huge personalities. They have no idea what kind of lives lay ahead of them.
The next stop was the General Hospital in Port Au Prince. This just might be the poorest and most miserable hospital in the world. In the bowels of this dreadful place is a dirty door that bears a sign that says, Unit Pour Les Enfants Abandonés. (Unit For Abandoned Children.) It's where thousands of Haitian babies and kids who are thrown away end up. Having a cleft is just one of many reasons they might end up here. Some are crippled, mentally impaired, autistic, diseased, etc. Healthy children who end up here disappear quickly, stolen and sold to black-market adoption rings that pay up to $20,000 per child.
Those who are left, the "rejects", are left to die, two to a bed. There was no laughing or giggling here. Just quiet desperation, an occasional moan, soft crying. 15 minutes was as long as I could take in this room, this "dying room," before I went outside to get some fresh air. Some of these children have been in these cribs for years.
We visited a clinic which was hosting a medical mission sponsored by a Smile Train partner. As you can imagine, there are very few plastic surgeons in Haiti and few that are focused ..ing the poor. Thus, we need to send in teams of Americans in the short term, and hopefully will be able to train local Haitian surgeons over time. There are about 15,000 children in Haiti who are suffering with unrepaired clefts.
We met many of the children and spoke to their parents. Some had come from far away when they heard news of a free cleft surgery program. All of them were very poor and could never afford this surgery.
We met a woman who epitomized how tragic the situation in Haiti is. Andrea, who looks like she is 65 years old, is actually just 35 years old.
She has been waiting all her life for someone to help her. And no one ever did. Well, at least not till a couple weeks ago when we showed up. We operated on her 30 minutes after I took this picture. Her surgery took about an hour, and it will dramatically improve her life, (or what little she has left of it).
But imagine if someone had helped Andrea when she needed it most. Imagine if 30 years ago, someone cared enough to put their arm around a very poor, very frightened little girl and helped her. She could have gone to school, could have married, could have raised a family. The same one-hour surgery that we gave her a few weeks ago she should have received 30 years ago.
It would have saved Andrea from 30 years of pain and suffering and heartache. Now that I have completely depressed you, I want to tell you the good news. Yes, there is some good news! After returning from this trip, we have come up with a plan to build a major program in Haiti that will help not only all the children with clefts, but children with other problems as well. I will keep you posted as these ambitious plans unfold.
Starvation is a major problem. Half of the population lives on less than $1 a day. The price of rice has risen more than 80% since December. There were food riots last month that left 7 people dead. The hunger is so severe and prevalent they have given it a name: "Clorox hunger"….because it feels like bleach is eating away at the insides of your stomach. To stop the pain, some Haitians have resorted to eating cookies made of mud. Yes, mud, dirt, the earth. I thought it was a bad joke, but it is true. Hard to believe that this is going on in a country just two hours away from the U.S.A, where obesity happens to be one of our major health problems.
I must say I was not excited about this trip. Haiti is the kidnapping capital of the Americas. Armed gangs rule half the neighborhoods. The government is weak, the police nowhere to be seen and U.N. soldiers are few and far between. But we hired a local security firm and off we went. First stop, a visit to some local neighborhoods to see how our children and their families live. Village of God is a slum built on the banks of a dried up river "overflowing" with sewage and rotting garbage. The "houses" were shacks made up of scraps of tin, wood, rusted iron, and cinder blocks. We passed a steady parade
of people carrying plastic water containers back and forth. There was no running water or electricity. Wild pigs foraged all around us. Waste water flowed past our feet. The smells I cannot describe and I
cannot forget.
Later we went to Cité Soleil which holds the dubious titles of largest and worst slum in the Western Hemisphere. This place was scary. The police don't go here, armed gangs control the place, and 300,000 people – most of them children – live under unimaginable circumstances. The same shacks made up of rusted tin and twisted metal. No running water. No electricity. We poked our heads in a few of the shacks, walked around for about an hour (that was all that was safe) and shook our heads in disbelief. You wouldn't let your dog or your cat sleep in one of these "homes."
If you have recently sent us a donation, I thank you and Andrea thanks you. I hope this report makes you glad you got on board The Smile Train. We're certainly grateful you did. If you haven't sent us a donation in awhile, please consider it. Every month, the number of children who show up at our hospitals and clinics asking for help increases substantially. For virtually all of them, we are their only chance, their only hope. That's why I keep writing you and why we keep going on these trips.
These kids need our help.
And we need yours.
On behalf of all 30 of us here at
The Smile Train, thank you for
your support.
Brian
Co-Founder and President of Smile Train
I just returned from a field trip to Haiti and I thought you might like to see how your donations are making a difference in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Over the past 15 years I've traveled to some awful places. Inner Mongolia where people are so poor they're living in caves. Northern Uganda where the average life expectancy is 42 years. Tribal areas in India where day laborers make 17 cents a day and farmers commit suicide because they can't raise a $100 dowry to marry their daughter. Bangladesh where I saw 3-year-olds begging in rush hour traffic. I thought I knew what extreme poverty was. I was wrong.
My recent trip to Haiti was one of the most depressing and shocking trips I have
ever taken. Two hours off the coast of the world's richest country, 9 million men, women and children are living amidst absolute squalor and desperation.
In spite of all of this poverty and squalor, as we walked through these slums, we were met with friendly faces and smiling children. We saw, met, joked with, touched and held hundreds of kids during our neighborhood walks." Most of them had no shoes, shirts, etc. Some had no clothes at all. We showed the kids pictures of themselves which always drew gasps of astonishment. Most had never seen pictures of themselves. They laughed and giggled like kids everywhere do. Many of them had beautiful smiles and huge personalities. They have no idea what kind of lives lay ahead of them.
The next stop was the General Hospital in Port Au Prince. This just might be the poorest and most miserable hospital in the world. In the bowels of this dreadful place is a dirty door that bears a sign that says, Unit Pour Les Enfants Abandonés. (Unit For Abandoned Children.) It's where thousands of Haitian babies and kids who are thrown away end up. Having a cleft is just one of many reasons they might end up here. Some are crippled, mentally impaired, autistic, diseased, etc. Healthy children who end up here disappear quickly, stolen and sold to black-market adoption rings that pay up to $20,000 per child.
Those who are left, the "rejects", are left to die, two to a bed. There was no laughing or giggling here. Just quiet desperation, an occasional moan, soft crying. 15 minutes was as long as I could take in this room, this "dying room," before I went outside to get some fresh air. Some of these children have been in these cribs for years.
We visited a clinic which was hosting a medical mission sponsored by a Smile Train partner. As you can imagine, there are very few plastic surgeons in Haiti and few that are focused ..ing the poor. Thus, we need to send in teams of Americans in the short term, and hopefully will be able to train local Haitian surgeons over time. There are about 15,000 children in Haiti who are suffering with unrepaired clefts.
We met many of the children and spoke to their parents. Some had come from far away when they heard news of a free cleft surgery program. All of them were very poor and could never afford this surgery.
We met a woman who epitomized how tragic the situation in Haiti is. Andrea, who looks like she is 65 years old, is actually just 35 years old.
She has been waiting all her life for someone to help her. And no one ever did. Well, at least not till a couple weeks ago when we showed up. We operated on her 30 minutes after I took this picture. Her surgery took about an hour, and it will dramatically improve her life, (or what little she has left of it).
But imagine if someone had helped Andrea when she needed it most. Imagine if 30 years ago, someone cared enough to put their arm around a very poor, very frightened little girl and helped her. She could have gone to school, could have married, could have raised a family. The same one-hour surgery that we gave her a few weeks ago she should have received 30 years ago.
It would have saved Andrea from 30 years of pain and suffering and heartache. Now that I have completely depressed you, I want to tell you the good news. Yes, there is some good news! After returning from this trip, we have come up with a plan to build a major program in Haiti that will help not only all the children with clefts, but children with other problems as well. I will keep you posted as these ambitious plans unfold.
Starvation is a major problem. Half of the population lives on less than $1 a day. The price of rice has risen more than 80% since December. There were food riots last month that left 7 people dead. The hunger is so severe and prevalent they have given it a name: "Clorox hunger"….because it feels like bleach is eating away at the insides of your stomach. To stop the pain, some Haitians have resorted to eating cookies made of mud. Yes, mud, dirt, the earth. I thought it was a bad joke, but it is true. Hard to believe that this is going on in a country just two hours away from the U.S.A, where obesity happens to be one of our major health problems.
I must say I was not excited about this trip. Haiti is the kidnapping capital of the Americas. Armed gangs rule half the neighborhoods. The government is weak, the police nowhere to be seen and U.N. soldiers are few and far between. But we hired a local security firm and off we went. First stop, a visit to some local neighborhoods to see how our children and their families live. Village of God is a slum built on the banks of a dried up river "overflowing" with sewage and rotting garbage. The "houses" were shacks made up of scraps of tin, wood, rusted iron, and cinder blocks. We passed a steady parade
of people carrying plastic water containers back and forth. There was no running water or electricity. Wild pigs foraged all around us. Waste water flowed past our feet. The smells I cannot describe and I
cannot forget.
Later we went to Cité Soleil which holds the dubious titles of largest and worst slum in the Western Hemisphere. This place was scary. The police don't go here, armed gangs control the place, and 300,000 people – most of them children – live under unimaginable circumstances. The same shacks made up of rusted tin and twisted metal. No running water. No electricity. We poked our heads in a few of the shacks, walked around for about an hour (that was all that was safe) and shook our heads in disbelief. You wouldn't let your dog or your cat sleep in one of these "homes."
If you have recently sent us a donation, I thank you and Andrea thanks you. I hope this report makes you glad you got on board The Smile Train. We're certainly grateful you did. If you haven't sent us a donation in awhile, please consider it. Every month, the number of children who show up at our hospitals and clinics asking for help increases substantially. For virtually all of them, we are their only chance, their only hope. That's why I keep writing you and why we keep going on these trips.
These kids need our help.
And we need yours.
On behalf of all 30 of us here at
The Smile Train, thank you for
your support.
Brian
Co-Founder and President of Smile Train
Two hours off the coast of the world’s richest country, 9 million men, women and children are living amidst absolute squalor and desperation.
Two hours off the coast of the world’s richest country, 9 million men, women and children are living amidst absolute squalor and desperation.
Two hours off the coast of the world’s richest country, 9 million men, women and children are living amidst absolute squalor and desperation.