The Mission of Rotaplast International is
to provide free reconstructive surgery and treatment for underprivileged
children worldwide, to provide
education, and to advance research in the prevention of cleft lip and
palate.
learn more about
Rotaplast
The Cleft Parent Guild began over 40 years ago
as a support group for parents of children with cleft lip
and / or palate who wanted and needed more information about their birth
defect. The Cleft Parent Guild was affiliated with the Cripped Children's
Association of Los Angeles. Members had the opportunity to meet and
ask questions of well known and respected specialists from many disciplines.
The group was fortunate to have received donations from the Vikings Organization and several endowments. This has permitted the all volunteer board to offer financial assistance to its members.
The Cleft Parent Guild has been a major supporter of Rotaplast and it's international work to educate, gather data and treat cleft palate and lip.
SPECIAL THANKS TO ROTAPLAST
MISSION TO INDIA SPONSORS
Rotary Districts Districts 5260, 5240, 2980 and
the Rotary Club of San Jose, Catholic Health Care West and St. Francis
Memorial Hospital of San Francisco
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SWC EDITIONS publishes quality books of photography,
journalism and fine art. The company was founded in 2000 by noted entrepreneur
and photographer, Wayne Schoenfeld. Recent offerings have included selections
by such well known photographers as Joyce Tenneson, Mark Frank, Danny
Conant, Kathleen Douglas, Carolyn Johnson and Jerry Johnson as well as
four monographs by Schoenfeld, himself. Other artists whose works have
been published by SWC EDITIONS include well known painter, Luc Leestemaker
and engraver Solomon Illouz.
SWC EDITIONS supports humanitarian efforts throughout the world.
In 2001, SWC EDITIONS published "EXHALATIONS," edited by Joyce
Tenneson. All of the funds from the sale of the book were donated to Deep
Root, an association of native artists that raise funds to help homeless
children in Mexico. In 2003, SWC EDITIONS published , "ALMOST PERFECT:
An American Volunteer Medical Mission to Vietnam, " photographed
by Wayne Schoenfeld. All funds from the sale of the book are being dontated
to Rotaplast International to support their volunteer surgical teams.
In 2004, a collaborative new book photographed by Wayne Schoenfeld and
written by Rex Weiner about Rotaplast's MISSION TO INDIA will be published.
All funds from the sale of this book will be donated to Rotaplast.
Daily Journal - Karaikal, India
January 21- February 1, 2004
Wednesday
, January 21, 2004 I fix my eye
hopefully on the opposite sidewalk, make a silent appeal to the broad
spectrum of local deities from Ganesh and Shiva to Allah, Christ and whomever,
and perform the death-defying feat of crossing Karaikal’s main drag
at morning rush hour… braving a furiously-paced pageant of monkeys
and mendicants, auto-rickshaws and motorcycles, roosters and nanny goats,
along with bicyclists, bullocks, burkhas, businessmen and a couple of
buses passing two abreast at full tilt, everyone’s horn wailing
to high heaven. MORE>>
Thursday, January 22
The boy with the haunting eyes peering
out over the shirt collar yanked up to his nose like a veil is just about
the worst case the Rotaplast doctors have ever seen. A kerosene stove
explosion a couple of years ago left sixteen-year old Rajkumar with tight
bands of mottled scar tissue around his neck pulling his head down, the
chin melted away and lower lip fused to his chest; A painfully open cavity
gaped where a mouth should be. MORE>>
Friday, January 23
Mr. Pakirasamy from the tiny Tamil village of Annakuppy stood
in the white-tiled corridor of the Vinayaka Hospital watching his five-year-old
daughter being led away into the OR where Dr. Mel Spira was waiting to
fix up her incomplete cleft palate. Pakirasamy was the first of the long
line of patients to register yesterday. It had been a long process to
this point. Now it was all happening. MORE>>
Saturday,
January 24
White caps danced to a morning
breeze tickling the Bengal Sea as the sun climbed over the South India
coast. A gaggle of kids from a fishing village clambered happily over
the painted plaster deities of a beachside Hindu temple. Barefoot farmers
ambled off to work in the rice paddies surrounding Vinayaka Hospital,
about six kilometers from the Tamil Nadu town of Karaikal. MORE>>
Sunday, January 25
A power failure last night at 7:40 pm plunged all of K-town –
and the operating rooms at nearby Vinayaka Hospital - into darkness. Rotaplast
surgeon Ron Gemberling bent over a patient in OR 1, working on a lip repair.
Surgeons Capozzi and Spira were in OR 3 and getting read to cut a suture
to complete a nasal revision.MORE>>
Monday,
January 26 Republic Day… India’s nationwide blowout. Schools close, offices shut down, families go visiting. But this was no holiday for the Rotaplast team. Before dawn at Vinayaka Hospital they were in the OR working on the first of today’s cleft lip and palate cases and looking after the Post Ops from before. MORE>>
Tuesday, January 27
Waking up groggy at nine in the morning in the Post Op ward, twenty-eight
year old Ganthimithy Kodamathy looked up to see a big man hovering a few
feet from her face pointing a camera, another guy waving a flashing light
and someone else scribbling on a notepad. Maybe it wasn’t her best
moment – or ours – but after surgery last night, the results
were pretty dramatic. She looked 100% better than when we’d snapped
her picture and chatted yesterday. MORE>>
Wednesday,
January 28Gray troops of clouds marching in from the Bay of Bengal dumped cooling torrents of rain on the Coramandel Coast this morning, mercifully breaking the heat of the past few days. In the muddied streets of Karaikal, women hurrying for shelter gathered sodden saris into headscarves and men lifted dhotis as they stepped over the puddles. MORE>>
Thursday, January 29
“2 Elephants Electrocuted” says the page five headline
in The Hindu, the local English language daily slipped underneath our doors
each morning at the Paris hotel. It seems a couple of pilfering pachyderms
from the Sirumugai Reserve, reaching across a farmer’s electrified
fence for a bunch of bananas, met a shocking fate. The fences are supposed
to be battery-powered but an illegal direct current hook-up is suspected.
Authorities are investigating. MORE>>
Friday, January 30
There’s a buzz up and down the wards of Vinayaka Hospital
as the sun rises over the Bay of Bengal. Today is the last day of surgery
and all four ORs are busy. Tomorrow the Rotaplast team examines the one-hundred-plus
patients who have received reconstructive facial surgery; most will check
out and go home to new lives. MORE>>
Sunday,
February 1
Puspa’s six-month-old baby daughter, Santosh, was squirming
in her arms. It was 10:30 am Saturday morning and the infant’s lip
carried a reddish, still raw scar where the Rotaplast doctors had repaired
a jagged cleft a few days before. Now mother and child were itching to
go home after a week at Vinayaka Hospital. MORE>>
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