Ignace: Smile Scout

When Smile Train set out to expand our local partnerships in Madagascar a few years ago, we knew we were in for a challenge as enormous as the island itself. The terrain is stunning in its beauty but also maddening in its difficulty. Isolated tribes live scattered across every ridge and rift. What few roads there are tend to be in disrepair.

The result is that a child with a cleft in the country’s vast periphery might never know treatment was available, no matter how robust and well-advertised our programs are in the cities. And even if their family did know, they might never be able to travel to access it.

That is not acceptable to Smile Train. As an organization committed to ensuring every single person has access to cleft care that is high-quality, local, and free no matter who they are or where they live, we were determined to think outside of the bush and find a way.

Our Program Manager for Madagascar, Tsiferana Rakotoarisoa, solved it in her first few months on the job. Scouts are widely trusted across Madagascar and frequently travel to the country’s most remote reaches — often on foot — to serve those in need. She realized that by teaching them about clefts and giving them the resources to connect patients with care, these upstanding young men and women could reach countless people who otherwise might be left behind. When Tsiferana proposed the idea to the Scouts, they jumped at the opportunity.

And so did Ignace, an extraordinary pig farmer, college student, and Scout, as soon as he saw the ad.

“Visiting towns is like a hobby for me,” he said. “I’m really grateful that Smile Train recruits Scouts for this job. Scouts can walk long distances, do volunteer work, and take charge of all of it. That’s what’s really good about the partnership.”

That’s how he met Simon, a seven-year-old boy with an untreated cleft, in a remote village. Ignace showed his family before-and-after surgery pictures of other children with clefts on his phone and explained that not only was it possible to heal Simon’s cleft, all the cleft care he ever needed, including nutritional support and orthodontics — plus transportation to the hospital and back — would be free thanks to an organization called Smile Train.

The family was skeptical. They had never ventured far from their village before and this stranger was asking them to travel 30 hours each way in pursuit of a promise that sounded far too good to be true. They had never heard of Smile Train or seen the logo on his hat before. If not for the Scout badges on his uniform, they might never have trusted him.

“As I watched Simon leave the operating room, my heart was filled with joy and rejoicing,” his mother beamed a few months later. “I’m so grateful that Simon’s surgery went well. I thank Smile Train and I give thanks to God.”

“This collaboration suits us perfectly because helping people is an integral part of our values. It’s a kind of Scout good deed,” said Ignace.

At Smile Train, Ignace and his fellow Scouts are our heroes for trekking through forests, deserts, highlands, and swamps to bring health, life, and smiles up and down the world’s fourth-largest island. And if they insist that is just what they do every day, we think that just makes them all the more extraordinary.