Operation Smile and Our Medical Mission

If you are unfamiliar with Operation Smile, it is a non-profit, internationally recognized childrens charity that mobilizes a world of generous hearts and medical teams to heal children's smiles and transform lives across the globe. We offer surgery free of charge for cleft lip and palates through volunteer International Medical Missions in developing countries.

We (Mima and Olivia) will be away from the 19th through the 31st of March with a team of 70 people, made up of doctors, nurses, speech therapists, medical record keepers and more. We will be participating as student volunteers on the mission.


The primary role of a student on a medical mission is to Educate. We will be meeting hundreds of families and children everyday at the hospital or in local schools and orphanages. We will have the opportunity to give people presentations about Dental Hygiene, Oral Re-hydration, Burn Care, and Nutrition. We will also be spending time with children and families before their surgeries and after. We also have the opportunity to sit in on surgeries.


Sunday, August 8, 2010

Closure

Hello Readers,

I was just thinking about our mission experience in Aswan with Opsmile when I remembered that Jemima and I never made a closing entry on our blog. We never posted pictures like we said we would! Below I will include links to online photo albums about our mission in Egypt this year. I hope that by viewing these pictures you may be able to get an impression about how amazing our experience was.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=177849&id=505754412

Also, here is a link to Operation Smile's Student Stories. This link will bring you directly to my mission story. Jemima's has not been posted yet but I bet it will be up there shortly. It is pretty cool to read about what we student volunteers have experienced and I think a lot of the student stories paint a really beautiful picture about what we learned and how we grew during each of our missions.



Enjoy!

Olivia Mertz