Changing Faces

We learned a startling fact yesterday. In the United States the incidence of cleft lip and palate is one in twelve hundred live births. Here in Nicaragua it is one in eight hundred. That is twenty five pecennt higher than in the United States. The reason is simple - maternal nutrition. The women of the remote regions of Nicaragua often do not have a sufficiently good diet to nourish a healthy foetus. The result is a multiplicity of birth defects, such as cleft lip and palate.
Reparing a cleft lip takes about ninety minutes. The same time is required for the repair of a cleft palate. If the birth defect is serious four operations may be required until the child is sixteen. But there's more. Unless the operation is done before the child begins to learn to speak - normaly just around one year old - the child will never learn to enunciate properly and will always have a speech defect unless there is extensive speech therapy later in life. Therefore without surgery at the correct time, a life will be blighted for good. Dr Herdocia told us he performs perhaps two or three such operations pro bono per week, a maximum of 150 per year. In a country of six million, many of whom are living at subsistence level, there is a crying need for what he does.
Fortunately Gustavo Herdocia is now involved in a training initiative to bring more plastic surgeons into the system. Working with other reconstructive surgeons from the USA, Switzerland and Germany, the Nicaplast methodology is spreading to other countries in Latin America and even to Mongolia!
But the issue of nutrition remains and in spite of the Nicaplast organisation, children will continue to suffer unless their mothers receive better nutrition during pregnancy. Here the work of midwives like Mama Licha in Esteli, northern Nicaragua is vital. But trying to get the message across about nutrition to young women and girls who may not even know how they got pregnant - there is almost no sex education in this country - is a huge task. The donations the Fund makes to Gustavo Herdocia and Mama Licha are important but only a small part of what is really needed.