Thanks to Dr. Cuadros — and Smile Train — having a cleft on the Navajo reservations of New Mexico is no longer a sentence to a life of isolation and sickness.
Magaly is the mother of David, age five, a Smile Train patient in Quito, Ecuador. She shared with us her son’s journey to cleft care and what Smile Train has meant for her entire family.
Ayubu's classmates harassed him relentlessly for years because of a local myth about clefts. When he was 10 years old, his mother heard there was hope at a hospital less than an hour away.
"Knowing the strong emotions I felt when Ethan was born, it was hard to imagine how a family with no access to life-saving surgery would feel. I wanted to help."