Haitian child to the Boston for cleft palate surgery

[Anonymous]

I just spent ten days on a work retreat in southern rural Haiti in a community called Fond des Blanc. The girls and I have been fund raising for the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation, so that they could build a new surgical unit onto their small hospital, so we went to Haiti to see it and check out all the hard work. The surgical unit is near completion and is wonderful. You know they don’t really have the capacity to do surgeries in Haiti? Babies and folks with medical complications like heart defects are left to die, if they cannot make it to the States.
On a day trip to downtown Port au Prince, we took a tour of the big general hospital in Haiti. What a disaster! The dear pediatrician who gave us a tour, Will Cadet, was trying to get fellow physicians to contribute a small percentage of their salaries, so that the hospital could buy paper to write prescriptions on; the hospital has been out of prescription paper for some time.
So many things moved us to tears, but one left us shocked. The hospital has an abandonment room where patients who are left abandoned at the hospital needing a procedure the hospital cannot offer, like heart surgery, are left to die. The day we visit, a baby is left abandoned, and a resident claims she will take it home; it is tiny, but looks perfect with a purple night gown. The room is funded by a German foundation. In October there were 750 live births there, and the premature room only holds six with only one warming light table available. With such limited capacity, Will says some tough choices are often made. He thinks the survival rate for premature babies of 20% is pretty good. What an optimist!
Eight years ago, Will, as a young medical student, took home one of the abandoned babies before it was sent to the abandonment room. The baby is now 8 and is named Fabienne. The child has been having some speech problems and is getting teased. Not surprisingly to me (or to you I bet) , Will recently found out that Fabienne has a submucosal cleft palette. In Haiti, they don’t screen for such things, nor is there treatment or surgery. As I think of this, this is perhaps why Fabienne was abandoned in the first place; probably there was difficulty feeding and the baby wasn’t thriving and the mother gave up hope thinking it was an infectious disease or something fatal ( we went to mother Theresa’s and all 50 infants there had TB).
I told Will I would make an effort to bring Fabienne to Boston to get some of the surgery that is so important to his success in life. Haitian folks have so many rivers to cross, so many rocks to tow, this would be a small thing that would make Fabienne’s trip a bit less difficult.
Do you have any ideas. Is there any sort of help available for a submucosal cleft palette surgery for Fabienne? Please get back to me when you get a chance with any thoughts or suggestions.

[Caroldove@aol.com]

Hi, I Don't know if this will help or not but the Shriners in Springfield does work with cleft affected children. I know it is free but I don't know if it is free for someone that is not a citizen. I use to live in MA so I know this is not to far. If you would like you can e-mail me and I will send you the site. Also you might want to call the cleft palate teams in the Boston area and get info from them. Operation smile might be another source of information and the cleft palate foundation. I can send you these sites if you like. I wish you luck and hope you can get the little guy here!
Carol