A mother in Africa gives birth to a child with a facial deformity. Her village tells her that the birth defect is a result from a sin she must have committed. The witch doctor tells her the baby is mentally retarded and better-off dead. If the mother enrolls her child in school, classmates will yell ‘monster’ and most certainly the child’s education will end right there. Barely surviving on a daily meal of sadza (corn meal) and black tea, the cost for surgery in her country would be thousands of dollars, however this mother and her husband earn roughly $30US per month if they are lucky enough to have one of the scarce jobs that are available.

Given the gritty backdrop of developing countries, tears of joy pour easily when the US volunteer facial reconstructive surgical team Operation of Hope donates surgeries for children suffering from cleft-lips and cleft-palates. Twenty-one years ago, retired E.N.T. surgeon Dr. Joseph Clawson began offering free surgeries for children in need and has seen his ‘family’ of volunteers grow to three annual missions. In two decades, Operation of Hope has impacted lives in Ecuador, Mexico, Russia and Zimbabwe. Dr. Clawson recalls, “In the beginning we had a pencil with an eraser and enormous hearts. The only thing different now is we upgraded the pencil with a computer.”

Dr. Clawson’s daughter, Jennifer Trubenbach, is the Executive Director and helps run the team from her office in Lake Forest, California. Jennifer was recently featured in a September 08’ People Magazine exclusive when her family housed a young boy named Beloved from Zimbabwe who needed complicated surgery in the US. When Beloved was 10 years old, he placed a land-mine in his mouth thinking it was a transistor radio. Without blinking, Jennifer and her husband Ted, took a second mortgage on their home to pay for the surgery. Jennifer explains, “We knew we had to help Beloved as if he were our own. The hard part was when the People Magazine article hit, readers looked at this and said, ‘oh how nice of that couple to pay for Beloved’s surgery that cost $180k.’ Truth is, we are still trying to pay-off this loan.”

The good news is, California doctors Keith Blackwell M.D. and Babak Azizzadeh M.D. donated an extremely satisfying 9 hour free-flap surgery and Beloved has a whole new look on life. To see and hear Beloved’s story, visit www.operationofhope.org and click on his short movie.