Since her birth, Baby Celine had struggled with her health due to a lack of oxygen in her blood. She had been born with a complex hear defect which could not be repaired in her home country of Uganda, and we recently shared with you on our blog Celine’s Brave Fight that she would be traveling from Uganda to Israel for heart surgery.
Our 2019 LWB cleft team would like to send one final hello from beautiful Lanzhou, China. The gorgeous Gansu countryside We welcomed a very special guest to the cleft trip last night, a kind and caring woman named Ms. Xu. She was the wonderful orphanage director who made it possible back in 2006 for Gong […]
Today was the last full day of surgeries for our team in Lanzhou, and the hospital ward was brimming with children all recovering from their cleft operations this week. Handsome Peyton It was time to say goodbye to some of the wonderful kids who had their surgeries at the start of the trip, such as […]
Day Four is a wrap, and after being taught by the Chinese hospital team how to make homemade dumplings tonight, we can update everyone with very full and happy tummies. We’ll just say we’re not going to quit our day jobs because this isn’t exactly how a traditional Chinese dumpling is supposed to look, but […]
Happy Day Three everyone! Our team had another wonderful day in Lanzhou, with 9 children receiving surgery. First up, of course, was morning rounds, to make sure every child who had surgery the day before was doing well post-op. Two-second summary – they are! Kamryn’s lip repair looks absolutely beautiful, as you can see below. […]
Welcome to Day Two of the 2019 LWB Cleft Surgery Exchange – also known as “Let the surgeries begin!” Sixteen children were on the schedule for today, so our team wasted no time doing final checks on their patients before getting underway. First up for Dr. Buckmiller’s room was 8-month-old Finley, a gorgeous little boy […]
It’s almost Chinese New Year, and it’s a wonderful time to visit some of the children in our programs. Today, LWB’s team in Anhui drove out to the rural countryside to pay a visit to baby Oliver and his family. Oliver was born with Down Syndrome and a complex heart defect. His family had been to multiple hospitals begging for help for their son, only to be turned away. Today our team got to deliver the wonderful news that our supporters had fully funded the heart surgery he needs to survive.
Just over a year ago, LWB-Cambodia began working in remote Sokhem Village, near the border with Thailand. The rural communities of western Cambodia continue to face significant challenges decades after the tragic genocide by the Khmer Rouge. Extreme poverty is rampant, and human trafficking remains a critical issue. The families in Sokhem Village struggle to […]
Earlier this month, we introduced you to another preemie who had been found in January and taken to an orphanage in central China. The staff of the orphanage called us right away, and baby Connie was immediately moved to the NICU of the provincial children’s hospital. This photo shows how tiny she was compared to the diapers on the bed with her!
If you pick up any travel guide to Cambodia, you will see under the “weather” section that almost all of them say you should never travel in September, due to the rainy season. But of course I wasn’t heading to Cambodia for tourism purposes, but instead to meet the local children there. So rainy season or not, I was on my way. Before I left, I received an email from Leng, the man I was going to meet there, which simply said, “Please prepare for mud.” I will admit readily that I was woefully unprepared, and I should have paid more attention in school to what “monsoonal rains” really mean.
We left for the first village at 7:30 in the morning, in the pouring down rain, and our brave tuk tuk driver was soaked to the core before we even climbed aboard. Read more.
