Da Lat

Da Lat is a city in the mountains west of where we are working. As it is at 5000 ft. The climate is very different and the hillsides are covered with vegetables and coffee.




- View from one of the hotels


One of the places we visited was the summer palace of the last king. Some of the group decided to play the role of the monarchy.




It was a nice relaxing weekend.

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Than's Story

Than is a young man that's was born without a left ear. He was teased a lot about it by his schoolmates. Last year we began the process of building him an ear by using cartiledge from his ribs.
He returned to the team this year to have the next step. This time we placed a skin graft behind the cartiledge to lift it from his head.


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Before the skin graft




After

He will need another procedure next year to complete things.

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One lip at a time

The first patient we did was a 14 year old from one of the mountain villages. He had not gone to school because the other children teased him. Because the family lives so far, they had never made it to one of the many teams that come to the country. We were told to do him the first day because he might leave.




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Going into the operating room





Next morning

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A Rocky Start

Don't usually talk about the trip, but this was an interesting adventure. Snow to get to the airport. Canceled flight. Rebooked with good connections only to spend an hour on the ground in Hartford thus missing the rebooked Washington connection by about 15 min. Fly to Newark to catch the original flight the next day.
Did arrive to help with the afternoon of the screening clinic. We have about 50 patients scheduled.
Dinner was provided by the nuns at a local Buddhist monastery.


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Final Day

The last day was spent doing some touring in the area of Guiyang with two college students who were some of our interpreters during the last three days.  They are international relations majors and will be studying in England next year.  It was fun to learn a bit about their lives.  They are both female and single children of parents who both work. 

Our first stop was a park along a small river.

After walking for about an hour, we had lunch at a local restaurant with “country food”.  It was a nice change from the more formal meals.

We then went to a center for the study of Confucianism.  It was built with government money,  and will be a place to teach children the skills promoted by Confucius, writing, manners, music.

Entrance to the center with our two students

At the end we saw a video that gave a brief history and then ended by saying how China wanted to be a world leader in promoting the principles of Confucianism.  These include respect for nature and fellow humans.  Of course this is somewhat contradicted by their current suppression of minority groups.  It has also been very frustrating how blocked the Internet is.  One cannot Google anything. I was out of reading material and wanted to get a book from Amazon.  Could not do that.  Have not had access to my New York Times the entire trip.

More Teaching

Today I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Shao Min.  She is about 45 and is from Guiyang where we are working.  She went to medical school here and then went to Shanghi for her plastic surgery training.

We did two cases with me as surgeon and then I helped her with the last one and with the pointers that I gave her in the first cases did an excellent job.  We then had a lively discussion about other aspects of cleft surgery.

Dr. Shao finishing our last surgery.

The two of us during our post surgery discussion.

Another Clinic Day

Well it is back to work.  We are now in the city of Guiyang which has a population of 30 million or the equivalent of the state of California.  We are working in a Stomatology Hospital.  It  is primarily a dental hospital, but in most of China it is where the cleft care is done.  We saw about 30 patients with the local surgeons, orthodontist, and speech therapist.  Once again the goal is to help them establish a center for the care of these children in a coordinated manner.  Of these six were thought to be good teaching cases and will be done with the local surgeons.

Some of the kids cooperated with us and were not so happy to see us.

This child presents with a complication that will be very difficult to correct.

And some just had cute haircuts.