Marriott's Lunch for Operation Smile Patients

Cebu City Marriott Hotel GM Roy Abraham and Ayala Business Club represented by Neil Yu (Ayala Life) joined hands in hosting a Christmas lunch and gift giving to 51 indigent children with cleft lip and cleft palate deformities at the Grand Ballroom last December. These children are the beneficiaries of Operation Smile International’s medical mission in Cebu come February 22 to March 2, 2009 at Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center. This is the 12th time the Mariquita Salimbangon Yeung Charitable Foundation, Inc. (MSYCFI) is sponsoring the mission.

Already, 200 patients have registered with MSYCFI office at 501 Cebu Holdings at Cebu Business Park. This we gathered from Monette Aliño, Executive Director of the foundation and site coordinator for OPSmile Cebu. Foreign and local doctors and nurses, anesthesiologists, dentists and other medical volunteers numbering around 55, will be arriving on the 20th of February.

As soon as lunch was over, MSYCFI chair Mariquita S. Yeung was supposed to deliver her message, but because of a previous engagement, she requested her daughter Atty. Carla Yeung to speak on her behalf. London-based Carla, speaking with British accent, drew the audience to a hush, listening intently to her speech which thus said: “The good thing about hosting this Operation Smile mission is we had never really been short of helping hands. We noticed that the bigger the projects the more people with generous impulses like you came to becoming poor for having given away a part of their earnings, or having lost some opportunities. Truly, God is a tremendous supplier.”

Before the program ended, Chadleen Alberth Lacdo-o rendered two songs dedicated to the 51 patients scheduled to undergo operation on February 22. Chadleen, as we all know, is an Operation Smile beneficiary who used to have a cleft palate and she was operated on by Dr. Han Kai from OPSmile China sponsored by MSYCFI. And for her, her long-time dream that she could sing again finally was fulfilled because of Operation Smile Miracle.

We remember an old adage that goes: “Thank you for knocking at my heart and making me remember your words…” I shall pass this way but once…whatever I can do, let me do it now, for I shall not pass this way again!”