International Women's Day 2024
#InspireInclusion
Women and girls with clefts are often doubly marginalized: They regularly lack the same opportunities as the men in their lives. Add the health issues come with clefts and the poisonous stigma of being a female who looks different, and the result is that countless girls are growing up in shame, not accepted for who they are, all for lack of basic healthcare.
Smile Train is committed to #InspireInclusion by helping women and girls with clefts reclaim their lives, their voices, and their smiles. Just as we have done each day for the past 25 years. Here are some of our partners, staff, and supporters who #InspireInclusion each day. Get to know them below and make sure to share their stories on social media.
Dr. Diana Bohόrquez, a Smile Train partner craniofacial surgeon in Oaxaca, Mexico has spent years navigating being a female in a male-dominated field. Now she has some well-earned wisdom for other women looking to follow in her path: “Stay you.”
In her journey from Smile Train patient to doctor, Dr. Mayuri Kalyanpad of Maharashtra, India, has seen the double standards women face from all sides. It only motivated her to dedicate her life to making the road easier for others, as an aspiring psychiatrist specializing in treating children with clefts.
Dr. Mayuri is living proof that if you want to empower girls with clefts, you must also empower the women who want to treat them. That’s why we designed a model that grows local cleft care capacity by investing in the talents and passions of healthcare workers in the places our patients live. Like Dr. Tsitsi Chimhundu-Sithole, Zimbabwe’s first pediatric anesthesiologist, and a Smile Train partner.
Smile Train is a women-led organization, and we take pride in hiring outstanding female leaders like Phensiri Charoensuk, our Program Manager for Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.
Striving to #InspireInclusion also means listening to the struggles of women and girls with clefts closer to home, who so often struggle with issues like body image, loneliness, and depression. As a girl, Em Stott knew those feelings all too well… and they drove her to pursue her ambition of becoming an actress. Today, she is living her dream on international TV and says her cleft is her favorite thing about herself.
That’s how we #InspireInclusion. That’s Smile Train.