The Philippines are ranked 5th in the world in the number of cleft births every year. There are an estimated 180,000+ Filipinos living here with unrepaired clefts today. The vast majority of these are children who will never be helped because they’re too poor.

While the average income per capita in The Philippines is about $2 a day, the children we help are the poorest of the poor and their families make nowhere near that amount.

Strange isn’t it that there are places in the world where some families are so poor that they dream about making $2 a day? (In America, the average income per capita is about $110 per day.)

Once you land in Manila, you don’t have to travel far to find thousands of poor children with clefts. A 15-minute drive brings you to one of the largest slums in Asia, an infamous garbage dump called Smokey Mountain.

The name comes from a methane-heavy mist that hovers over the dump.

From a distance it looks ominous. As you get closer, it gets worse. You begin to see animals swarming over this mountain of garbage. Then you realize they’re not animals at all, but children, thousands of children, teenagers, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers — entire families crawling and scavenging over and enormous, steaming, stinking, rotting garbage dump.

The stench is overwhelming. The air is hard to breathe. The heat never ends as half of Smokey Mountain is always smoldering on fire. Many children suffer major burns as they mine this burning inferno for food and valuables they can sell. Dante would surely have given this place its own level in his inferno.