Indonesia experience report
I have seldom operated in a country where our aid has been used so effectively. In the absence of everything, the patients were extremely grateful.
Another mission took place in Indonesia in 2016. We supported 30 operations on the island of Flores this year. On this island, which many tourists visit because of the Komodo dragons, there are so many children and adults with harelip and wolf throat living in the mountains, isolated from the world! The people there are really terribly poor, they just manage to feed themselves with their low income and agriculture. They earn an average of 5 euros a day. The children who are born there with a deformity have no future at all and also no opportunity to improve their lives on their own.
We flew from Jakarta to Kupang in Timor, from there to Labuan Bajo in Flores and then drove another 4 hours in a pickup into the mountains. The patients were already waiting for us in the dark, and we examined them immediately. The next day we started operating immediately, 30 patients on three tables, it was unbelievable. With many we closed immediately.
Lips and palate, because you never know whether the children will come back. And not only children came, but also many young men with large, gaping cracks on their faces who had never seen a doctor before.
But especially in such primitive areas, where you reach your limits yourself, it is all the nicer to be able to help people, because there they really need us! And one is all the more happy when some of the children make it after all, like this young man who works in a hotel in Bali. Hardly anyone here sees that they were also born a harelip child!
