Being There Was Really All That Mattered

By Ed Christine, Managing Editor
The Danville News, Danville, PA
Saturday, November 4, 2000

People stood around the room in small groups. Moms, mostly. Some grandmoms. A few volunteers. All of them shepherding a little kid. Nobody said much because there was not much to say and there was no way to say it.

Besides, everything anybody needed to know was written in the kids' faces. Each of them had one kind of deformity or another. A mom worked her way through a line nudging a little boy ahead of her. They were dirt poor, literally and figuratively. The boy had a gap in his lip that an adult could fit two fingers through.

"Tell her we're going to fix that," one of the doctors said to a translator. Before the words got over the language barrier, the woman was in tears. "Thank you," she said, repeating the only two English words she knew. Watching that from the back of the team picture, someone said: "This is why we're here."

Trying to fit a recent trip to China into an easy framework is impossible because there was no main character and there was no main story. Instead, there were dozens of characters and there were hundreds of stories and what pulled it all together was an organization called Face the Challenge.

So pick it up right there with this promotional message: FTC is a medical mission based in Colorado that sends surgeons, support teams, supplies and equipment to foreign countries to fix facial deformities on kids from poor families. None of it is complicated, really, because there are only two things each team member must possess. One is a little faith; the other is a lot of
compassion.

Naturally, that raises some questions about how a journalist got to be part of this particular FTC team, but there should never be a question of why anyone would want to be part of an FTC team. Since there is bound to be some curiosity, however, here's another reason why.

The girl had white hair and pale skin and no medical degree was necessary to recognize she was an albino. She also had a facial deformity that turned the Chinese definition for cleft lip into a visual. The Chinese call it "rabbit lip."By the time the girl and her grandmother had finished the preliminary examination, a translator had taken these notes: If the American doctors couldn't fix the girl's face, the girl's parents had told the grandmother to come home and leave her by the side of the road. Pressure? "We're the only hope some of these kids have," said John Campana, an extremely talented surgeon from the University of Colorado. Actually, this girl now has some hope because after the surgery there was a scar where a blown lip had once been. A very thin scar. "Thank you," the grandmother said later. The only English words she knew.

That, too, is why these docs, these nurses, this team was there. "Just to hear people say ‘thank you’ makes it all worthwhile," said Danville's Rennie Crane, an oral surgeon whose talents play extremely well in these settings. "When they look you in the eye, and it comes from their hearts, there are no language barriers."

No cultural barriers, either, and no political barriers. Randy Robinson is a guy who overcame all those barriers. Overcame them in China, and Vietnam, and Bolivia and a bunch of other places he has taken FTC teams. Overcame them with heart and overcame them with skill and the consensus is he has few equals on either front. First days of surgery on these trips are always the most difficult. This trip was no different and on the first day of surgery, Randy Robinson had created an ear from part of a rib, made a nose where there had only been a hole, and formed a lip from two flaps.

Obviously, this was a good day and later, standing at the end of an empty hallway, there was this quiet beginning and ending to an exchange with Rennie Crane. Randy: "There's such a good feeling at the end of the day like this when you've worked so hard and you know it means something." Rennie: "That's why we're here." There would be many moments like that on this trip to China. Moments of faith and moments of compassion. Moments of hope. Moments when Chinese looked Americans in the eye and talked to them from the heart and there was no need for translation. "Thank you," they said. During those moments everyone knew exactly why they were there.

Ed Christine, Managing Editor of the Danville News, can be reached at dnwsedit@mail.microserve.net.