Another of our desired goals for an operation like this is to not only provide cleft lip and palate repair, but to also interact with our colleagues to providing an educational experience. It’s naïve to assume that our surgical colleagues lack the necessary skills to perform these operations and that we can “show them” the “right way” to do the operation.

In fact, many of them are accomplished surgeons, and the reasons they might not routinely perform reparative cleft operation has little to do with their skills, experience and available facilities. For these and many other reasons, we encourage the local surgeons to become more involved with our effort – this not only helps engender a more collegial training atmosphere, but ultimately benefits our patients as well.

The challenge is that some of our Chinese colleagues aren’t fluent in English (and we’re certainly not anywhere near conversant in Mandarin, or Cantonese) and so rely on interpreters to guide us while they or we assist during surgery. Not surprising, when you operate with colleagues as experienced as they, you realize the unspoken language of surgery needs no interpreters and procedure move along fluidly…. . It transcends the approach of “we’re doing something for you, because you aren’t able” to become “we’re doing something together because we both are able and have a common goal”…