Photos courtesy of Samaritan’s Purse (Kim Rowland). Story by SP’s Annette Bennett.
TRADING STIGMA FOR SMILES
In October, Samaritan’s Purse brought cleft lip patients from across South Sudan to Juba for surgery. On board ten MAF flights, were 151 passengers including babies, children and young adults and their carers from eight locations across South Sudan. It wasn’t just the patients that were left with beaming smiles.
They were able to carry out 120 surgeries over the ten-day outreach. More than 700 lives have been transformed in the ten years since the project began 2011.
The Samaritan’s Purse nurses have a mirror ready so the first thing the patients see when they come out of surgery is brandnew smiles. The lucky ones are The medical team of 26 too small to hold the mirror. theatre nurses, anaesthetists Others have waited years or and surgeons from the US even decades to see the face have travelled, foregoing their that is smiling back. No-one holiday to spend twelve hours a really knows why children are day inside an operating theatre born with the condition, which at Juba Teaching Hospital. happens when a baby’s lip or 18
mouth doesn’t form properly during pregnancy. Cases range in severity from cleft lip to the medically complex cleft palate. There are no figures on how widespread the condition is in South Sudan or how many adults and children may be living (and dying) with the condition in remote communities, hidden away from prying eyes. In the western world, the condition is diagnosed in the womb and treated soon after birth.
