Surgical Assistance
With a strong focus on helping children, Operation Blessing China aims to provide needy children, orphans, handicapped children and children suffering from various diseases with access to critically needed surgical treatments. These needed surgical procedures result in saved lives, cured diseases, improved quality of life, and an increase in the likelihood of an orphan being adopted into a family
and/or being able to lead an independent and fulfilling life. In addition, Operation Blessing China helps certain identified elderly or adults with simple surgical procedures that help them regain an ability to take care of themselves and their families, remove social stigmas and bring renewed hope.
- Operation Blessing China has helped over 2,628 patients receive various surgeries since 1999
- In 2006, 483 patients received life-transforming surgeries in more than 10 provinces
- 410 children received cleft lip and palate surgeries
- 29 children received life-saving heart surgeries
- 14 elderly and adults received eye surgeries
- 30 for other various surgeries
- In 2006, 6 children received fitted prosthetic devices and walking aids enabling them to walk normally again
Cleft Lip and Palate Surgery
The “Set a Child Free” surgical program in China aims to perform life-transforming cleft-lip and/or cleft-palate surgeries for children worldwide suffering with facial deformities that affect their ability to speak, eat and even smile.
Operation Blessing China’s cleft lip/palate surgery program matches donors with orphans and other impoverished children born with cleft lips/palates. Since 2000, we have treated more than 2261 children. We currently conduct the program in the following provinces: Beijing, Xinjiang, Henan, Shandong, Shanxi, Gansu and Hubei. Our goal is to provide surgeries for about 40 children every month in 2007 through this program.
In China, approximately 35,000 infants are born with disfiguring cleft lips and/or palates each year. Most are too poor to afford corrective surgery. Without it these children often live life ostracized from society while enduring many health problems. Infants sometimes starve to death because they are unable to nurse. School-age boys and girls don’t attend school because of their humiliation. The disfigurement is sometimes seen as a curse. Marriage is often out of the question. And meanwhile, many are abandoned by their birth parents to languish in an orphanage without hope of adoption.
With very little we can do so much to change these precious youngsters’ lives. In partnership with hospitals, government, corporations, and caring people like you — we provide free operations to give children living in poverty or an orphan a chance for a better future. A gifted surgeon can erase traces of the deformity with little or no scarring.
Orphan Surgery
Operation Blessing China’s focus on orphans stem from their great need to be cared and loved. Help comes in many forms, such as providing highly nutritive milk formula in several orphan care facilities, improving the orphanages’ facilities, donating gifts, visiting orphans and training the caregivers in their work and care of the orphans, ultimately enabling the orphans to lead a healthy, happy and hopeful life.
Many children become orphans through abandonment because of physical or mental disabilities, abandonment because of finances and social situations, discriminate against females or from disasters. Over 50% of orphans have a physical or mental disability…they not only need to deal with the hardships the diseases cause, they also have to live with the knowledge that their parents abandoned them. Operation Blessing China aims to give these orphans the attention that they deserve by providing life-saving and life-changing surgeries, tuition, room, and board for their special education, as well as other need-based help. It is our goal that they will be able to live a life of fullness and quality as they move to towards independence in adulthood. In many cases, this surgery was just the thing they needed in order to be adopted into a loving family. For others, it was a matter of life or death.
Our mission in a nutshell is to do the work of healing their bodies, improving their quality of life, sometimes even saving their lives, and accelerating their return into a loving family.
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