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.
At one month old, Mirian weighed just four pounds. Five months later, with the support of our local partners, she had transformed into a happy, chubby baby.
Angelica was 15 years old, single, and had just given birth to a baby with a cleft. All she knew about clefts was how she had seen people with them harassed without mercy. But she promised to never give up on the little life before her.
Nurse Celeste always tried to avoid working with the babies with clefts in her neonatal ward because she felt unable to meet their needs. Then her son was born with a cleft.