Once again I’m on an Operation Smile mission on very short notice. I had turned down this mission as the timing is not great for me, but after the coordinator couldn’t find a pediatrician to replace the one who dropped out and the mission was in danger of being scrapped, I relented. At some point, I’m going to find my dream mission and call in my favors.
The Tegucigalpa airport has the shortest runway of any international airport in the world, and is situated right in the center of the city. The pilot did a great job landing, circling around sort of like one of those coin vortexes where you drop in a penny or a quarter at the top and it goes round and round until it disappears down the center hole. Luckily our destination wasn’t a hole but rather a small patch of concrete. We’re in a nice hotel with an outdoor pool and hot tub. There are several team members from Sweden, and one from Finland, and they spent the afternoon alternating between the hot tub and the pool. I guess it’s cold and dark where they came from.
We had a long team meeting in preparation for the first of two days of screening tomorrow, but also to be informed about the “Cleft Eradication Mission” that is going on in Honduras. For the past year, Op Smile has been doing an intensive training program for surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, dentists and speech therapists, and also formed a partnership with the country’s electric company. When the meter-readers, (or their equivalent,) go to someone’s home, or to a village, they go house to house asking if anyone has a cleft or if they know anyone with a cleft. They leave brochures about Op Smile and its free care. In the last 10 months, they’ve found 600 people. One hundred have had surgery, 200 more are in the pipeline and the other 300 are pending. In addition, a father of a three year old who is an Op Smile patient was so grateful that he decided he would help other families. So far, he has brought 40 patients to Op Smile. Tomorrow, he and Op Smile people are having a training clinic for parents of patients on how they might find other cleft patients and help their parents get to Op Smile. Finally, 14 patients and their parents that he found who have not yet been screened or treated are coming tomorrow for us to screen. There’s a film crew here to make a film about it for use in promoting Op Smile and fund raising. It means it will be very chaotic but as the director of Op Smile Honduras told us, we are part of something historic. Their goal is to have treated every existing person, adult, child and infant with a cleft by 2018 so that then they can just focus on treating newborns with clefts. It’s a huge undertaking just to find the patients, especially since so many are hidden or hiding.
Well, that’s it for now. I’ll wait till tomorrow to post photos when there are some of screening.
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