A Christmas Gift for Children

Caught up in the confusion of holiday shopping the other day, we fell to thinking about the diversity of giving, about gifts that have nothing at all to do with malls. We found ourselves recalling a scene a month or two ago in a far off place, Accra, where some Americans took a rare gift to people caught in the desperate poverty of West Africa.

Lisa Frasco, a child-care therapist in the pediatrics unit at Kaiser Hospital, San Diego, was sitting on a mat on the concrete floor outside surgery at Korle Bu, one of Ghana’s largest hospitals. She was entertaining a dozen children waiting for surgery with “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” and if the words were not well understood, her smile was. The smallest of the children was cuddled on her lap. A few feet away, a Los Angeles surgeon stood in the breezeway examining the deformed hand and arm of a teen-age boy, while another child, his face a mask of scars from a burn, waited his turn. Inside, the two surgical theaters were filled, two operations under way in each, four at a time.

Operation Smile International had brought a medical team for a fortnight of training and treatment to one of three clinics it sponsored in Africa this year. The service consisted of four plastic and reconstructive surgeons, a pediatrician, five anesthesiologists, nurses, technicians, support staff--26 in all--and 120 packing cases of modern equipment. In charge was Cmdr. Mitch Grayson, a surgeon at the Navy Hospital in San Diego, a veteran of Operation Smile the visited clinics in the Philippines, Costa Rica and Liberia.

“Education was the main thrust of the team,” Grayson said. “In the operating room, we worked hand in hand with the Ghanaian doctors, teaching them and learning from them.” Each day began early with lectures for 60 medical students and seminars for doctors who came from all parts of the country. A daylong symposium on burns was attended by 200. “The doctors know their work, and many are foreign-trained, but they have not had special training in plastic surgery, in burn reconstruction,” noted Dr. Randy Sherman, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon from Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

Ghanaian doctors had been unable to remove a large external tumor from a woman because they had not been trained in the tissue reconstruction necessary after removal of the tumor. The visiting team removed the tumor, using so-called flap surgery to transfer tissue for the reconstruction, then conducted a workshop to train the local doctors.

It is little wonder that the visitors created a national sensation day after day in the Ghana newspapers and on radio and television. Indeed, the chief of state, Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings, made ward rounds with Sherman and Grayson after the last of 80 operations had been completed.

What gifts! The teen-age boy’s twisted hand is now straightened and useful for the first time since it was injured in early childhood. Twenty children had cleft lips and palates repaired, 40 were operated for burn reconstruction, another 20 for traumatic and congenital deformities. And 200 doctors and medical students have, as Dr. Grayson put it, “been given the tools to go out and perform this work.”

Gifts of new life, guaranteed for life--or longer.