Here you can view some of the photos from Guwahati and keep updated with my experiences here.
I will explain a few things first so the rest makes sense.
I have been volunteering with Operation Smile for a few years now, traveling to a number of countries and taking part in various medical missions. In October last year, I was volunteering in Brazil when one of my friends, a plastic surgeon, asked me if I were interested in joining this project he was involved in, which meant me moving to India and working in a new centre for Operation Smile.
Operation Smile is a charity Organisation that provides surgery to children and adults born with cleft deformities, free of cost. Clefts are much more common here than in the west and although there is no established “root cause”, there are definite links, including vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition in utero. That is why is is much more common in developing countries. In Assam alone, there are an estimated 30,000 people who suffer from cleft deformities, and the biggest problem is they do not have the resources to treat them accordingly.
There a number of issues that come with having a cleft deformity, apart from the obvious aesthetic concern. Firstly, children with both lip and palate deformities often have terrible feeding problems, and as a result, are often severely underweight. This is because they have big “hole” in their palate which means their food comes out of their nose when they eat. Also, because they have no hard palate, there is no bridge for their tongue to bounce off when they are learning to speak. So most of these people cannot speak properly (that is why even after surgery, we provide ongoing speech therapy). In some cultures, it is even believed that babies born with clefts are “cursed” and therefore are outcast from society and excluded from basic privilege’s like going to school.
That is why Operation Smile, together with the Assam government, decided to build a center here in Guwahati. Rather than doing small 2 week missions a few times a year, there will now be a permanent center that will provide surgery to treat this huge number of cases. The idea is that we will train local staff so they can continue to run the center once we have gone. My job is to train and work alongside the local nurses.
The center is in its final stages of construction and we are told will be ready at the end of February. Until then, we are working at the main hospital (where the center is)..
rosieinguwahati 