A Seminole dentist organizes volunteers each year to go to Peru for surgery on victims of cleft lip and palate.
By JADE JACKSON LLOYD
Published March 24, 2004
SEMINOLE - In Peru, being born with a cleft lip or palate means shame is part of your birthright.
Other children don't play with you. Your parents hide you or kill you. If they don't, they risk their jobs to keep you around. You are a modern-day leper.
Earlier this month, Dr. Sandra Jean Lilo left her Seminole dental practice for one week and led 34 other volunteers in an ongoing crusade to end this stigma, one mouth at a time.
Lilo, 46, organized Rotocleft in 1998 after a similar mission did not have room for her. Then, she and 23 dentists, anesthesiologists, plastic surgeons and translators served 40 children in the tiny town of Huanaco.
Now, six years later, the mission has grown.
Volunteers from four different countries helped perform 42 cleft lip and palate surgeries on children and 1,000 dental extractions on both adults and kids from three regions of Peru, Lilo said. They also did cleanings and fluoride treatments.
For the first time, volunteers built a greenhouse at the Huacho Vocational and Agricultural School to help attack malnutrition at its root: people's diets.
The mostly Florida-based group left Feb. 27 and returned the first week of March. After flying into Lima, Peru, they took a two-hour bus ride to Huacho, where dozens of people awaited their arrival.
The group immediately got to work, interviewing potential patients, taking medical histories, conducting physical exams and creating a surgery schedule all within the first four hours.
When asked if any one person's life was changed by the surgery, Lilo smiled, revealing a set of bright white teeth.
"They're all changed," she said.
At 16 months old, the youngest patient they saw had had the deformities for a little more than one year. The oldest, a 33-year-old woman, had dealt with the social consequences of her cleft lip her entire life.
She had undergone an operation once before, but her lip was poorly repaired. Once Rotocleft doctors had finished with her, she had a patched-up lip and a reconstructed nose, Lilo said.
"As a 33-year-old woman, your looks are important to you," she said. "I don't care who you are or where you are. ... She looked good" after surgery, Lilo said.
Another first for the mission was the addition of a poster child. Literally.
Luis Huallano, 6, received a cleft lip operation from another group last year. A Rotary Club in Peru put his pictures on posters to generate excitement for the Rotocleft trip, Lilo said.
It worked. People came by foot and by bus to get access to the free operations.
(Lilo raises money for the surgeries, which cost $120 to $140 per child, through speaking engagements throughout the year and matching funds from different Rotary Clubs. Volunteers pay their own expenses.)
"Sometimes, they just walked out of mountains to come see you," she said. "It's amazing."
Rotocleft doctors operated on Huallano during this trip, closing his palate "so he could eat without food coming out of his nose," Lilo said.
Lilo served as the administrator for the trip, doing everything from securing funding to keep the medical costs as low as possible to packing all the medical equipment and soliciting volunteers.
She performed no surgeries, yet she knows she had a hand in changing the lives of hundreds of people.
"We're more than just a surgery team," she said. "We're acting as ambassadors. We're possibly the only people they may see from America. ... It's important we leave a good impression."
"I look at it as a gift I've been given to organize the team," she added. "I view it as a satisfactory way to satisfy my mission here. I feel it's intentional that I do this."
George Bessler, a Rotocleft volunteer for the first time, agrees.
At 43, he used his skills as training chief for the City of Seminole Fire Rescue to oversee the recovery room in Huacho. As such, he brought parents in to see their children's new faces.
"Just everybody in the whole family was waiting to see how their relative was doing," he said. "I got to see two, three generations affected by the surgery on just one child alone ... It was really rewarding."
