This year, the medical and non-medical team helped bring smiles to families through more than surgery alone.

Anna Weston has been volunteering with Operation Smile for four years and has been on five medical missions. As a speech pathologist, she reaches every patient on the first day of the medical mission for a medical evaluation and forms a connection from the beginning.

Yerling said she was in total shock when she saw her daughter, Marianna, for the first time.

Mirna traveled for 15 hours to get to the Operation Smile medical mission in Estelí, Nicaragua today.

Volunteering with Operation Smile has made me a different person. My experience began four years ago during Operation Smile’s first medical mission in Guatemala.

Melony’s eyes welled up with tears up as she recalled the moment she first saw her baby girl’s cleft lip.

In my work in the Peace Corps in Madagascar, I have witnessed multiple babies born with a cleft who pass away due to malnourishment. Babies with cleft conditions so severe, they never learn to breast feed and their mothers stop producing milk. Parents are left tirelessly trying to find solutions on how to keep their child alive.

With her bright eye shadow, playful scrubs, dangly earrings and genuine laugh, Vicki Darnell exudes a fun and spunky energy – evident to anyone in the room with her.

Sidonie is a beautiful girl from Antananarivo, Madagascar, but lived with a cleft lip until she was 7 years old.