VIA volunteers support Operation Smile

Volunteers from the Village Improvement Association of Rehoboth Beach’s Health and Wellness Committee recently created and delivered 41 boxes of blankets, hospital gowns, smile bags and their contents to the global headquarters of Operation Smile in Virginia Beach, Va.

These vital materials are needed to help prepare children in countries all over the world who will undergo life-changing surgery to correct facial deformities. Operation Smile was founded in 1982 by plastic surgeon Dr. William P. Magee Jr. and nurse Kathleen Magee to repair children's cleft lips and cleft palates. They created the international charity to raise funds and gather volunteers to provide free surgeries for children and young adults around the world.

Without corrective surgeries, these children face serious medical problems including malnutrition, impaired speech and language development, cultural stigma and social isolation. Most of the children in those countries who do qualify for the surgery come from families with extremely limited resources, so they often arrive without even a change of clothing or supplies suitable for the surgery and recovery period. That is the need the VIA volunteers decided to fill.

Mary J. Sparks and her team of more than 40 volunteers created kits for the children. They sewed 79 hospital gowns, created 333 warm blankets and shopped for the post-surgery care items to fill 180 smile bags. In the end, they assembled goods worth more than $4,000.

The core group packaged the kits and hundreds of supplies into boxes and loaded them into a truck. Volunteers Nancy Cirelli, April Irelan and Phyllis Fischer drove 340 miles to Operation Smile to deliver these life-affirming kits.

Sparks thanks all the workers who have tirelessly embraced the project to help alleviate the suffering of children with facial anomalies around the globe.