.Dr. Bill and Kathy Magee, co-founders of “Operation Smile,” a non-profit medical service organization that provides cleft lip and palate repair surgeries to children worldwide, arrived yesterday at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport from Los Angeles, California, USA, on Philippine Airlines flight PR103...
Magee said it was back in 1982 when he and his wife joined a group of American doctors and nurses on a mission to provide free surgery to Filipino children with facial deformities in a small village in Naga, Camarines Sur.
Magee said he and his wife felt very bad when the mission was only able to operate on 40 children out of the 200 who came to the site. He promised to himself he will return to Naga to work on more children.
And return he did. The very next year, Magee and Kathy assembled a new team of surgeons and went back to Naga.
They were surprised to find 500 children waiting for them. The Magees said they were overwhelmed by the number but the team tried their best to do as many operations as they can.
“The operation kept on growing and snowballed, requiring us to come back year after year and bring with us more and more volunteers,” Kathy said.
“We are just too happy that the support from other people keeps pouring in so we can continue provide these surgeries to children in need. It’s so heartwarming to see the smile on the children that we operate on and in a way, give them their lives back,” she said.
more about the organization HERE and HERE
More here (scroll down to story) about how coordination with the AFP, JTOTF-P, the local government and a local charity enabled the NGO to work in the dangerous south to help the kids last Spring.
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