 | |
INTERNATIONAL. Following the amazing success of October’s ‘Turning Tears into Smiles’ fund-raising dinner* in Hong Kong on behalf of children’s cleft charity The Smile Train (co-organised with Hugo Boss), The Moodie Report is delighted to announce that The Smile Train has now become our official charity.
In coming years we plan to continue raising funds and awareness for this inspirational and refreshingly transparent charity. Here we present the latest country report from co-founder Brian Mullaney. It makes for emotional but mandatory reading.
Dear Friend,
I just returned from Afghanistan and I thought you might like to hear how your donations are helping children in this very poor, war-ravaged country.
 | |
Months ago, when our partners invited us, they told us it was safe. Of course, one week before our trip, a suicide bomber in Kabul killed 35 police recruits – part of a new Taliban offensive aimed at bringing the war to the capital. We almost cancelled. But a celebration had been planned. Patient home visits had been arranged. It seemed the staff of our partner hospital was counting on us. So off we went.
 | |
Flying into Kabul was, I must admit, a little spooky. Looking down from the airplane the terrain was bleak, barren and lifeless. Rocks, rubble and dust. Our airplane felt more like a time machine bringing us back to the Stone Age.
What looked Godforsaken from the air, looked even worse from the ground. Afghanistan has been at war for 30 years – and it looks it. 30 years of bombs, bullets, betrayals, executions, rebels, insurgencies, beheadings, broken promises, honour killings, forced marriages, tribal warfare, occupation, religious extremism, invasions, etc. The drive to the hospital from the airport was one I will not soon forget.
Crumbling cemeteries with broken headstones and crooked graves. Bombed out buildings. Burnt out trucks and cars. Bullet holes everywhere. Rotting garbage. A dead donkey. A dirty, smelly stream trickling through the center of town where a vibrant river once ran. A city that looks like it is on life support.
 | |
The one nice thing we saw were hundreds of girls in school uniforms coming home from school, laughing, smiling, wearing backpacks just like ordinary teenage girls. Little symbols of hope amidst so much destruction and desperation.
 | |
The average life span in Afghanistan is just 43 years. (In the UK it is 79 years.) The annual per capita expenditure on healthcare is £6.62. (£1,421 in the UK.) One out of every three Afghan children is an orphan. One out of five children dies before they reach their 5th birthday. (Some parents don’t give their children names until after their 5th birthday.) 80% of marriages are arranged and 57% of the brides are under the age of 16. 4 out of 5 women are illiterate. They face the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world. And an annual income per capita of £113.34. (£16,026 in the U.K.)
 | |
As if living on 31 pence a day is not bad enough, the Taliban is doing everything it can to make life even worse. They’re killing as often and as many as they can – foreigners and Afghans. Burning down schools. They beheaded a school teacher in front of his wife and 8 children because he had the audacity to teach girls. The week we were in Kabul, the Taliban sent a six-year-old boy on a suicide mission. Luckily soldiers spotted the oversized jacket and disarmed him.
 | |
I could go on and on about all the things that are going wrong in this poor country, but instead, I want to tell you about something that is going right. Right smack in the middle of Kabul stands an oasis of hope: our partner hospital.
This small, 60-bed hospital is run by a heroic staff of Afghans and ex-pats who’ve come from all over the world to help the people of Afghanistan. It is a nonprofit hospital supported by donors from America, the UK and around the world that has had a very big impact in a very short time. In addition to the lifesaving work this hospital does with ob-gyn and orthopaedic surgery, it became a Smile Train partner and began offering free cleft surgeries about 8 months ago.
Just a few free TV commercials aired over a couple days brought hundreds of children with clefts and their parents from all over Afghanistan to this hospital begging for help. We met a young boy and his father who travelled 800 kilometers. That’s like travelling from Inverness to London. By foot. It took them 3 weeks.
 | |
Every child we met was different and yet they all told the same story. They were all extremely poor. Most had to borrow money to make the trip. Some sold off family possessions. For many it was the first time they had ever left their villages. Virtually all the parents were illiterate and uneducated, but somehow each one was smart enough to know that this might be their only chance to ever help their child. Their only hope to save their child from a lifetime of heartache and suffering.
 | |
We met a 17 year old boy and his smiling dad two days after surgery. I asked the dad how he felt when he first saw his newborn son. “I was so ashamed,” he told us. “I decided to kill him.” Now this actually happens quite often in many countries. We have met hundreds of children who were thrown away hours after they were born because of their clefts. But I’ve never heard anyone actually say these words. I asked why he never killed his son. “I never found the time,” he told us with his arm around his son.
 | |
We met a remarkable young man who’d been born with a massive cleft that ran down the entire middle of his face. We wondered how he managed to survive 22 years. This picture is AFTER he has already received 2 surgeries and he is scheduled for several more. He kept trying to thank us, by putting his hand over his heart and bowing his head. He can’t speak. It was heartbreaking.
We met a school teacher, a very polite, soft-spoken man who tried to tell us how much this surgery meant to him and the future of his son. He started to cry as he thanked us, and told us in his broken English, how important it was for his son, his only son, to have a chance to go to school and to marry and to have a life. This surgery saved his son’s life, he told us.
 | |
We met a remarkable Afghan surgeon named Dr Hashimi. As often is the case, the key to a successful Smile Train programme is a local, dynamic, determined leader like Dr Hashimi. He used to perform only a small number of cleft surgeries because so few parents could afford it. Now, with our support, he can provide free cleft surgery for thousands of children who would otherwise never receive it. One of the reasons we went to Kabul was to thank and recognise Dr Hashimi for performing 250 cleft surgeries in just the first 8 months of our programme. He and his very capable staff are off to a very good start. He is excited about just how many children he can help and so are we.
“There are so many children who need this surgery,” Dr Hashimi told us shaking his head. “So many years of war have created a very large backlog.” We didn’t have the heart to tell him just how big a backlog. Our data shows there are more than 25,000 children in Afghanistan with unrepaired clefts.
 | |
We asked how many surgeries he could do in a year. Maybe 800, maybe 1,000, he told us. “I will do the very best I can,” he told us. We assured him that whatever the number was, we would give him all the support he needed. We encouraged him to get those TV commercials back on the air and promised to help him build an additional O.R. if needed.
 | |
We told him how The Smile Train has never turned away any child that asked for help and that whether there were 2,000 or 20,000 children in Afghanistan, we would stick with him till we helped each and every one.This made him smile. “That’s very good,” he laughed, nodding his head. “We will need your help. Because for every child I send home after surgery to a village, 5 more will come when they learn about this programme. We are going to be very busy for a very long time.”
 | |
After we had a short ceremony at the hospital celebrating the 250 surgeries, thanking the staff and giving Dr Hashimi a plaque to thank him, we raced to the airport to catch our plane back to civilisation and the 21st century. As we drove away from the hospital, I thought of all the remarkable doctors and nurses we were leaving behind in this truly Godforsaken place. I thought of what a special guy Dr Hashimi is. He could easily be in the UK or the US with his family safe and sound making many hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds a year doing cosmetic surgery and playing golf every Wednesday. He and his colleagues are true modern-day Good Samaritans. I meet a lot of surgeons in my job – I feel pretty lucky to have met Dr Hashimi.
 | |
I apologise for the length of this letter and I thank you for reading it. I hope that somehow I have conveyed a few very important things that you should know.
First of all, we bring your donations to the poorest countries on earth where the value of every pound is 1,000 times greater than it is in the UK.
Secondly, we don’t just send your money around the world – we send ourselves. This past year my colleagues and I have travelled to Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Brazil and Mexico to make sure your donations are being spent on helping children and that our programmes are being run as best they can.
Finally, and most importantly, you need to know that your donations are helping children no one else will help. Your generosity is changing lives with a simple surgery that takes as little as 45 minutes and costs as little as US$250. You are making a difference.
 | |
If you have sent us a donation lately, I thank you. I hope that this Report From The Field makes you glad you did.
If you haven’t sent us a donation in a while, please consider it. As always, we’ll use 100% of your donation to help children just like these in places just like this.
These children need our help”¦ and we need yours.
Brian F. Mullaney
Co-Founder and Chairman
The Smile Train UK
P.S. If you have any ideas, suggestions or criticisms please email me – brian@smiletrain.org . I would love to hear from you.
For more information on how you can help The Smile Train please visit www.SmileTrain.org.
* FOOTNOTE: For The Moodie Report’s Picture Gallery on the recent Hong Kong charity dinner click here. Final monies are still being received related to the event and we hope to announce the sum raised next month – after auditing by The Smile Train. It promises to be an extraordinary amount.
MORE STORIES ON THE SMILE TRAIN
Picture Gallery: The Smile Train Charity Dinner – a night of poignancy and passion – 09/10/07
The Smile Train heads towards US$300,000 fund-raising mark – with more to come – 07/10/07
Destination Hong Kong as The Smile Train charity dinner attracts a huge crowd – 03/10/07
Amazing industry support for The Smile Train fund-raiser in Hong Kong – 26/09/07
