Thanks to your generous donations last year over eighty children received life changing surgery for cleft lip and palate. So many of the children we find have other serious health problems and we do all we can to address these so that they can undergo surgery. Some of the children we helped last year received surgery, but those who sadly weren’t well enough to have their operations are still under our care.
Yogi and Yoga (pictured above) are identical twins, and, very unusually, they both had identical cleft lip and palates. We have often helped a twin with a cleft problem before but this is the first case we’ve seen of both twins with identical clefts. When we first found Yogi and Yoga they were very sick, with bad chest and skin infections due to malnutrition. We looked after them for over a year, doing our best to get them back to good health. They were both admitted to hospital twice and one of those occasions we thought we could lose them. After such a long battle we are delighted to let you know that both Yogi and Yoga have had successful surgery on their cleft lips. We look forward to being able to provide them with the palate surgery that they both still need.
We were hoping to start up our work again with cleft operations earlier this year but due to the coronavirus outbreak we have had to cancel all our future plans. Of course this is very disappointing for everyone, above all the parents and children that are awaiting surgery. We have no idea whether we will be able to carry out any operations this year, we are just waiting to see what the future holds.
As this ongoing crisis deepened, it came to our attention that some families were beginning to starve. Yogi and Yoga’s parents are very poor at the best of times. Their father made a daily living by driving a motor bike as a taxi in the town where we work. All of his work stopped as the lockdown came into place on the 22nd March, so this family now have no income.
Feeling that we must do something to help those in such desperate circumstances, we have started to raise money to feed some of the poorest families who have been directly affected by the coronavirus crisis. Our teams have already delivered food to hundreds of families and this project is still running thanks to all the generous donations we are receiving. We plan to carry on with our food distribution project until some kind of normality is restored and people can start working again. We have no idea when this will be, but for everyone around the world we really hope a change will come soon.
Thank you so much to everyone who supports us: our work is only possible due to your generous donations and your help is so very much appreciated, especially in these dark times.
