Camila’s Story is No Fairytale

Camila lives on an idyllic, tree-lined farm in a valley ringed with jagged mountains. She grew up spending long afternoons bouncing on her giant trampoline. Running back and forth across her private wooden bridge. Helping the fruits and veggies in her garden grow a little bigger each day alongside her grandmother and sister. Snuggling her goats and chasing her dogs through wide-open pastures.

Yet the storybook setting masks a darker reality: Camila spent much of her childhood in fear.

She was born with a cleft. It forced her to spend days at a time in the hospital. She had her first cleft surgery at four months old and went on to have three more before her tenth birthday. Before every one, her stomach knotted with the thought of what was going to happen to her while under anesthesia. How long and hard the recovery would be once she woke up.

Then, at school, other kids teased her for her smile. For the bandages she needed to heal it and the years of orthodontics she needed to straighten it.

In those moments, in those years, her grandparents’ farm was so much more than her house. It was her whole world. The one place where she could just be herself, carelessly swinging from a tree branch amidst a patch of saguaro cactuses.

However down she was, her cleft team was always there to make things better. She has received all of her care, including not only surgery, but orthodontics, dental work, and more at Fundación Gantz, a Smile Train Cleft Leadership Center. Growing up receiving consistent, personalized treatment from familiar faces, people who she’s always thought of as her second family, didn’t make the scary parts go away, but it did make them less scary.

Camila is now 16. Earlier this year, she sat on her bed with her grandmother and spread pictures of herself before and after each of her cleft treatments over her comforter. Like the river outside the farm that’s always new yet always the same, the babies and girls looking up at Camila each had different lips, different teeth, and a different nose. Yet they were all unmistakably still her, another current leading from the shy, scared child she had been to the confident, vibrant young woman she has become.

Freed from fear, Camila can, at last, fully savor her fairytale surroundings. And, as her cleft journey nears its end, she is ready to write for herself the happy ending she has always dreamed of — one that will make for a happier beginning for all looking to follow the trail she blazed from seclusion to a smile.

“I want to study to be a nurse practitioner so I can help other people just as they helped me,” she said.