Cleft Lip and Palate in Guatemala: Baby Ana
Less than one month ago, Baby Ana was born with unilateral cleft lip and palate in Guatemala. Ana’s mother, Doña Gloria, was concerned and distressed when she first saw her baby. For the first two days after giving birth, Gloria felt desperate because she did not know how to feed her newborn daughter.
Read More
Cleft Bottles and Formulas for Babies like Zack
All this week, we are raising critical funds to provide nutrition for babies born with cleft as we prepare to send a surgery team to Guatemala later this year. We are working side-by-side with Partners in Surgery to make sure every baby who comes to see our team will qualify for surgery. One of the babies waiting for his lip repair operation is tiny little Zack.
Read More
Preparing for Our Cleft Trip to Guatemala
LWB has always been passionate about helping babies and children born with cleft lip and palate. Since 2004, we’ve sent international medical teams to China and Cambodia to perform life-changing surgeries for children born with this medical need. Now, we’re excited to announce that plans are being made to send a medical team to Guatemala later in 2022!
Read More
Unity Initiative 2022: A Flurry of Hope
2022 began in a flurry of hope, thanks to supporters of our Unity Initiative. Our Unity Initiative exists to support impoverished families who are unable to provide medical care for their children. Without this program, many families in rural China would be unable to get their children the treatment they need.
Read More
Helping Others, One Smile At A Time
Julia Decker is on a mission — a mission to help others like her. Born in China with a bilateral cleft lip and palate, Julia lived in an orphanage for the first three and a half years of her life. An anonymous donor sponsored her lip surgery, which she feels was a catalyst to her getting adopted. “If I had not received this amazing gift, I might still be living in an orphanage and not with my amazing family.” Julia is now dedicated to helping other children born into the same circumstances.
Read More
A Healing Home Field Trip
Last week, some of the children from our Healing Home went on a field trip to an indoor play area at a big shopping mall with some volunteers. Due to COVID restrictions, this was the first play trip outside of the Healing Home that many of the children had ever been on. As you can see, they had a marvelous time making new friends, building confidence, and broadening their horizons!
Read More
Standing with Mothers: Cleft Surgeries
Every year from 2004 to 2019, LWB sent a team of doctors overseas to help provide surgery for children born with cleft lip and palate. We’ve always been passionate about helping children born with this medical condition, and so we were of course disappointed when our 2020 cleft surgery trip to India had to be canceled due to COVID.
Read More
Three Months After Heart Surgery: A Joyful Update
The last time we wrote about these six precious children, they had arrived home to Uganda following heart repair surgeries in India just in time for Christmas. We are so excited to share with you how each of them has been doing since their heart surgeries in India three months ago. They are all growing and thriving!
Read MoreNew Challenges
I ended Friday’s blog by saying that the shift in orphanage populations has significantly changed the responsibilities of nannies over the years. A decade ago, the nannies were caring for 10-15 children at a time in the main baby rooms….but on the whole, these were primarily “healthy” babies. Now they are often caring for the same number of children, but ones who have medical needs. Their jobs can be difficult indeed. I will never forget walking into a rural orphanage in a western province and seeing a nanny thread a worn looking rubber tube down the throat of a baby with cleft. She then proceeded to pour milk drop by drop into the tube. She explained that the child was unable to suck from a regular bottle, and so she had come up with this homemade NG tube on her own to save his life. Read more.
Read MoreBirth Defects
The first two reasons for the shift in orphanage populations in China are both positive ones – an evolving attitude towards girls and the sharp increase in domestic adoption. The third major reason, however, is quite sad.
Birth defects in China have risen 70% in the last decade. (See Source 1). Mr. Jiang Fan, of the National Population and Family Planning Commission stated that birth defects now affect one in ten households in China, with a child being born every 30 seconds with a medical need. Read more.
Read More
English
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish