Cleft Lip Surgery

Last week I took a team of Surgeon’s and crew up to a town whose sole purpose was to do cleft lips on mostly children. I’m not able to disclose the location, but suffice it to say that it’s an area that’s very closed to most outsider’s. We arrived there on Sunday and that evening yet were doing evaluations of the candidates for the surgeries. Since I was to stay with the group for the week I made myself useful and became the person doing the registrations and paperwork along with taking pictures for their records.

The funding is through a program called Bethany Kids and in order to secure the funding there is a lot of documentation that needs to happen along with pictures of the before and after for the records.

Some of the small children were difficult to see with such deformed faces, lips, and teeth. It was really an amazing site to see. But the most interesting was probably the teen girls. They came very beautifully dressed, but very hesitant as to what to expect. You could tell that they were really not sure if this was the thing that could change their lives. People told us that it does. It was really heart wrenching. Fixing a cleft lip is such a visible thing which you can tell by some of the pictures below. In the end we did 69 surgeries.

It was quite a dangerous area to be in for us, but the town really protected us well. We were there on their invite and they had armed guards with us everywhere we went. Even if we walked off to one side someone was there with an AK 47 to follow us.

It ended up being a very interesting week. The Dr’s have started a relationship with this town that is such a positive thing that I think there will be quite a bit more opportunities for these kinds of trips which is very good news. It’s an area that has been relatively abandoned and forgotten by the outside world. An area with a definite need for us to continue praying about. I felt privileged to be a part of the week and look forward to being able to return on another trip.