The Smile Program

CEBU, Philippines -  A smile can melt boundaries, reduce distances, and warm up hearts. Indeed, there is magic in a smile.

The MSY Foundation Inc. understands exactly what power a smile has. Since 1998, they have been continuously sponsoring Operation Smile in Cebu, brightening up the faces of almost 4,000 children and adults. Marquita Salimbangon-Yeung, MSY Foundation founder, confides, "I love to see person smiling."

Operation Smile is a world-wide organization devoted to taking part in transforming the lives of children with cleft lips, cleft palate and other facial deformities through free reconstructive surgery. Oral cleft is one of the top 12 congenital defects in the Philippines; one in every 500 Filipinos is born with a harelip or a cleft palate.

Each Operation Smile event brings together over 50 doctors and others volunteers, each desiring to give hope and put a smile on those that come to them for help. A smile brought to a single face quickly spreads to the rest of the family and the whole community. Operation Smile is in a mission to "give smile to those who have been deprived of it and that smile is theirs for a lifetime," says Monitte Alino, Site Director of Operation Smile Cebu and the Executive Director of MSY Foundation Inc.

Dr. Ricardo Barros, one of the volunteer doctors, relates that it is his fourth time serving in Operation Smile this year. He volunteers because he likes it, he likes to be of help, adding that he's doing it for the kids.

During the launching of the Operation Smile Cebu Mission on June 6 at Radisson Blu Hotel Cebu, volunteers were gearing up to serve 150 children and adults across the region. The operation started two days after, on June 8. Candidates were screened and evaluated for eligibility for the free surgery. The qualified surgical patients were then prepared for procedure.

The operation ran for a week, from June 8 to June 13, at the Adventist Hospital (formerly Miller Hospital) on Tres de Abril St., Cebu City and was simultaneously being done in four other cities in the Philippines, in Davao, Pampanga, Bacolod and in Borongan, Samar.

Operation Smile and MSY Foundation Inc. conduct the activity every year. Last year the outreach was hampered by the calamities that hit the Visayas, and the mission was shifted to the distribution of relief goods and rebuilding of homes in the stricken areas. This year, the Smile Program is back and many faces once again brighten up. (CAR)