Even after a mind-numbing 25-hour journey, you can feel that Varanasi is an extraordinary place.
Not just 12 time zones away from New York, but thousands of years back in time. At 5,000+ years old, it is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world.
It is also a major Holy City for the Hindu. They say if you die there, you go straight to heaven. The pyres on the river Ganges create bodies 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So rich in history and yet it is also one of the poorest places on Earth.
For the Smile Train, Varanasi is the cleft capital of the world. Smile Train does more surgeries here in a week, than it does at most places in a year.
This year, Smile Train will provide more than 5,000 free surgeries in Varanasi. (There were 163 primary cleft surgeries in New York City last year.)
We drove straight from the airport to G.S. Memorial Hospital. As we drove up, we saw a huge crowd at the entrance. It was a one-day registration for free cleft surgery. Something this hospital does every few months. You would have thought they were giving away $100 bills.
The vast majority of children had shown up at sunrise. They waited patiently with their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, neighbors, you name it. More than a thousand people.
They brought their cooking pots and pans, blankets, stoves, goats, rickshaws, etc. It looked like a refugee camp. All day they quietly waited their turn to be screened, examined, processed, pushed and prodded.
We pushed through the crowd, taking photos, shaking little hands, asking children for their stories, how far they had traveled, how they had heard about The Smile Train program, what this surgery would mean to them, etc.
It was an extraordinary experience.
In all my travels I have never seen so many children with unrepaired clefts in one place at one time. It was overwhelming. It was sad. So many broken faces – and broken hearts – in one place.
The photos tell the story much better than I can. As we walked around people would “come to attention” when we got close. It was very uncomfortable, as if we were walking through an orphanage and these children and their parents were hoping desperately that we would “pick” them.
As we got near, a parent would put their hands on the son’s shoulders, a mother would present her baby. A little girl would look up and smile, or try to smile as best she could. They all were different sizes and ages and shapes but the one thing every child and parent had was the same penetrating, pleading look of desperation. I will never forget it.
Without uttering a word their eyes screamed at us – please help my child, please pick my child, please help us, please, please, please. The sight of so many other children with clefts, in need of surgery, gave every parent a panic attack – what happens if my child is not picked for surgery?
As we were walking around taking these pictures, interviewing children and their families, children were being screened and processed.
None of them knew if they would indeed receive free surgery. Most believed that only a small number of children would be lucky enough to “win the lottery.”
But I am happy to say that not one child was turned away that day.
After spending years with another charity that sent American volunteers on 2-week medical missions that turned away 3-4 children for every child they helped, we came up with the idea for Smile Train, as the first surgical charity that wouldn’t turn any children away.
And we don’t. Ever.
The credit for today’s amazing crowd and impressive feat of not turning any of these children away goes to Dr. Subodh, the renowned plastic surgeon who built G.S. Memorial hospital to honor his father who died 12 years ago. And his amazing team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, social workers, managers, etc.
Dr. Subodh is like many Smile Train partners, a modern-day Good
Samaritan who helps the poor every day of his life. I meet people like this on every trip and it is always humbling and inspiring.
With his own hands and heart, Dr. Subodh has changed the lives of thousands and thousands of children. He told me proudly how every time he sends one of his cleft patients home, he gives the parents $8 from his own wallet and tells them to make sure their child starts going to school.
$8 is what a year’s tuition costs in this part of the world. Sadly, most of these families can’t afford it.
After spending 3-4 hours at the hospital we set off to visit some patient homes.
We quickly saw why there is such an endless supply of clefts in Varanasi. The poverty is extreme.
People living in squalor. Mud huts. Skinny camels with their ribs showing. Women and little children working in the fields with their hands, carrying wheat on their heads, no livestock, no tractors, no equipment. It was as if the industrial revolution never happened.
There are only two industries here: tourism and agriculture. But when it doesn’t rain, there is no agriculture. But without irrigation these people are completely at the mercy of Mother Nature.
When she doesn’t cooperate and it doesn’t rain, people don’t work, and people don’t eat. More than half the children – AND adults – are malnourished and underweight. (Another reason for the high incidence of clefts.)
The average pay for a day laborer – which is what 90% of the men call themselves – is 23 cents a day. And they are “lucky” to get 15 days of work a month.
I can only imagine how little they pay the children. Yes, we saw lots of them, working the fields, carrying loads of wheat on their tiny heads, tending cattle ten times their size. I have a three, five and six-year-old at home and I saw many kids the same age as my kids out in the fields working. It was pretty sad.
We visited a patient home that looked like it was right out of the Bible, complete with the markings on the door. It reminded me of King Herod. But these markings were to say the children had received polio vaccinations. That’s good news, I guess.
But the fact that people are still living in the same mud huts, starving, barefoot, leading lives of desperation after 2,000 years seems just surreal. I wish American could have the opportunity to come and see how billions of people in the world are living today. It is shocking.
Our departure was delayed as Al-Qaeda announced they were going to take down a long-distance direct flight to New York. We met that criteria so there was lots of extra security and jitters.
The trip home was uneventful but long, 19 hours of sitting in the dark on a direct flight from Delhi to New Jersey. Plenty of time to think about all the good things we saw.
The saintly doctors and nurses who make The Smile Train a shining success even under the most difficult circumstances.
The grateful parents who would give anything – and often do – to give their child a second chance at life.
The children who show up with broken faces and broken spirits and go home with new smiles and new hope.
That is what The Smile Train is all about – turning despair into hope, and tears into smiles.
