Support life changing medical procedures for children

Our names are Alexia and Ava. A few years ago, we began volunteering for a Massachusetts-based non-profit called Medical Missions For Children (MMFC).

For more than 25 years, MMFC's team of volunteer surgeons, anesthesiologists, dentists, nurses and speech pathologists have traveled around the world to provide free surgeries for children born with facial deformities.

We began our volunteer experience in the office, helping to pack medical supplies for the missions, volunteering at fundraising events and collecting stuffed animals to give to the children. Then in June 2023, we were given the opportunity to travel to Guatemala on one of the medical mission trips.

Day One of a mission trip begins with Screening Day. The goal of screening day is to make sure children are healthy enough for surgery (they are not sick, do not have a fever or Covid and are not malnourished) and, second, to identify what type of surgery they may need. The Surgical Team Leader had us assist him with patient in-take and even assist with screening some of the patients. The first mom we met had walked 4 hours to get to a village that had a bus so she could then take a 4 hour bus ride to come see our surgeon at the hospital! (there were many stories like this throughout screening day). At the end of the screening day the surgical team builds a schedule of surgeries for the week. Day Two of the mission is the first day of surgery and the surgeons allowed us to scrub into surgery so we could observe the surgeries. They did a great job of explaining what they were doing and why they were doing it. Upon completion of surgeries each day we would then visit the children in the PACU as they were recovering from surgery and were being reunited with their families. The mission trips typically last a week. So many of the families we met during the week had traveled between 4-10 hours to reach us. Because in their villages they do not have doctors and when they are born with a deformity - they often do not know there is a way to fix it.

MMFC provides the following procedures on the Guatemala mission:

Cleft lip or palate surgeries generally take 1 - 2 hours depending on the severity of the case. For a cleft lip procedure, the surgeon sews the lip back into place and closes the hole between the lip and the nose. For cleft palates, they close the hole inside the roof of the mouth. The biggest problems children with cleft deformities experience are issues with eating, breathing, and speaking. Also, it is often the case because children with cleft or ear deformities look different they are often bullied.

A microtia surgery can be up to five and a half hours long and have up to 4 surgeons in the room. First, two of the surgeons will harvest rib cartilage from the patient’s body and over the next couple of hours carve the cartilage into the shape of a new ear. The other 2 surgeons create a hole in the side of the child's head and a flap of excess skin and then use plastic surgery to create the new ear.

We were allowed to return to Guatemala again in January 2024 and it was exciting because we got to see some of the children who were returning for their next stage of microtia surgery and for the first time MMFC had begun a pilot nutritional program. This pilot program provided nutritional support for 20 children for 3 months. This included nutritional supplements (formula, etc); monthly growth monitoring and control and family educational sessions. Based on the success of this pilot program, MMFC is now planning to roll it to out to additional mission sites in 2025 to include the Philippines and Tanzania.

Our experiences in Guatemala made us realize that if we could raise money for medical equipment for the hospital in Guatemala - then we could help hundreds, if not thousands of children for many years to come. So we met with the hospital to ask what they needed. The list was long. So depending on how much money we can raise will determine which piece of equipment we could donate to the hospital. One example, if we could raise enough money to buy a state of the art x-ray machine for the hospital it could be transformative in the care the hospital provides.

How you can help: It is through the generosity of others that organizations like MMFC are able to provide these life changing medical procedures for children in such desperate need of care. That need has only grown due to the Covid pandemic. There is a massive backlog of cases.

We are running our fundraising efforts thru MMFC so your donations will be 100% tax deductible. Thank you for reading about our story and any donation you could make would be greatly appreciated!!

***PLEASE NOTE WE HAVE AN IMPORTANT UPDATE....A VERY GENEROUS DONOR HAS AGREED TO MATCH DONATIONS UP TO $100,000 FOR OUR FUNDRAISER - SO YOUR DONATION CAN HAVE DOUBLE THE IMPACT!!!***

Alexia and Ava