Medical Missions Have Given 1,500 Foreign Patients Reason to Smile

A volunteer group that began five years ago with a modest mission to help deformed children in the Philippines has Peace Corps-like goals, a projected $4-million annual budget and ambitions that circle the globe.

Operation Smile of Norfolk, Va., has conducted medical and social missions in three countries, operated on more than 1,500 children and adults, set up several high school chapters in the United States and enlisted hundreds of volunteers.

Patients have included a man whose mother didn’t recognize him after 45 minutes of restoration surgery, a teen-age boy whose nose and mouth had to be rebuilt, and a woman who had a 36-pound growth removed from her face.

“Some of these people literally could not smile,” said Dr. William P. Magee Jr., who with his wife Kathy, founded the organization after participating in a 1982 mission to repair cleft palates and lips in the Philippines.

“Ten years from now, hundreds of cities will have people involved, each helping a different country around the world. I have no doubt.”

Pleading for Return

After the first Philippine trip, so many children and adults were left pleading for their return that they had to go back, Magee said.

Operation Smile now has sent plastic surgeons and others to the Philippines, Kenya and Liberia and started work to set up missions in India and South America. A team is to go to Columbia later this year.

Their major goal is to repair cleft palates and lips--operations routinely performed on children shortly after birth in more affluent countries. The Philippine patients average 10 years old, Magee said.

But the work with patients and communities goes on after the operations.

“We try to step out of the operating room and take care of the whole patient,” said Magee, a nurse.

The group plans its most ambitious project yet late this month, when it returns to the Philippines with 120 volunteers from 14 states, ranging from plastic surgeons to high school students.

Past missions have included dentists, speech and play therapists, sociologists, teachers and even an occasional computer expert. One group installed a donated computer at a Philippine hospital.

Reagan Doctor Participating

Among the plastic surgeons on this year’s team is Dr. Michael Vincent, who in August, 1985, removed a small cancerous spot from President Reagan’s nose.

Other renowned physicians have donated their services, including French cranial-facial specialist Dr. Paul Tessier, who operated on Salvacion Custodio.

Custodio, 27, who is returning to the Philippines with this year’s team after a year of surgery in the United States, had a cleft that extended from her eye to her mouth, doctors said.

A geneticist will travel with this year’s team to conduct research into why cleft palates and lips occur three times more frequently in the Philippines than in the United States.

The doctors plan to perform 450 operations and set up a cranial-facial unit at a Manila hospital. The high school students will work with a U.N. immunization program and visit a school they collected donations for in the town of Sipocot, about 200 miles south of Manila in the Bicol region.

The region around the scenic and still-active Mayon Volcano has long been plagued by depressed economic conditions, typhoons and Communist rebels.

The guerrillas blew up a bridge in Sipocot late last year.

Communists Not Problem

Magee said the doctors have operated on several children of New People’s Army rebels. He said Operation Smile has never had a problem with the Communists, who recently claimed responsibility for the killings of three U.S. servicemen outside Clark Air Base, north of Manila.

Operation Smile, which receives support from U.S., Filipino and African groups, runs on donations and the proceeds from Friday night bingo games in the Norfolk area.

It has had substantial support from the Christian Broadcast Network, founded by presidential candidate Pat Robertson, but spokeswoman DeLois Greenwood said Operation Smile is non-religious, apolitical and not affiliated with CBN.

Operation Smile pays much of the expenses of participants, including transportation, but their time is donated. If it does everything planned, the cost will reach $4 million for 1988, Greenwood said.

Life Turned Around

A Naga teen-ager, Antero Asico, first came to the doctors with a bandanna covering half of his face, which had been eaten away by a disease called noma, Magee said. He was turned away; the doctors felt his case was more than they could handle. But then they put out a message over local radio stations and, with help from the U.S. Embassy and contacts in Washington, had Asico on a plane to the United States in two weeks.

The young man, who had shunned social contacts for years, is now married and working as a carpenter in Naga, Magee said.

Another former patient’s family runs Naga’s Smile Beauty Parlor, named after the organization, the doctor said.

He said the movement also benefits its American volunteers, including young people who have formed Happy Clubs in several high schools. The clubs send youths abroad with the teams and raise money for Third World students.

“After two weeks, they come back different people,” Magee said of both the doctor and students who participate. “Their problems here seem petty, and they come back really stimulated to help their own community.”