f you saw Isadoro of Ecuador in a crowd his looks probably wouldn?t catch your eye. That?s a good thing. Up until a few months ago, Isadoro stuck out like a sore thumb. He was born with a double cleft palate that left his mouth permanently caught in a grimace. When people saw Isadoro?s face for the first time they had a habit of wincing.

In Isadoro?s village of Salcedo the average annual income is around $200 and a surgery to fix a cleft palate would cost about $50, too much for the average family to easily afford. In February, Isadoro was one of 270 Ecuadorians who received free medical treatment for birth defects or burns thanks to a group of Bermuda volunteers who were part of Project Change: Bermuda.

On Wednesday, Lifestyle?s reporter Jessie Moniz met with Ianthia Simmons-Wade Summerhaven administrator who went with Project Change to Ecuador in February along with Christopher L. Johnson, plastic surgeon from the Elan Clinic, Hannes Els anaesthetist and nurses Lesley Fife, Ricky Gunthorpe, Sarah Miller and Regina Todd.

?I would say for all of us coming from Bermuda, it was life changing having the opportunity to go to Ecuador,? said Mrs. Wade-Simmons. ?Some of the doctors pay their own way. Other people do fundraising to volunteer their time to do this.?

Her role was to pull together medical supplies for the trip. The group took 25 boxes of supplies on the plane including intravenous solutions, sutures, needles and whatever else was needed for surgery. A local company donated the medical supplies. The community donated other things like Tylenol, clothes, blankets and toys. The Telecommunications Ministry helped out by donating Walkie-Talkies to the project.

While in Ecuador, Project Change: Bermuda worked primarily on cleft palates, hand and ear deformities and burns. Mrs. Wade-Simmons said there was a high rate of deformities such as cleft palate in this area for genetic reasons and also because of poor nutrition.

?It was certainly eye opening for us to see so many people with the cleft lips and the cleft palates and so many people who had been burned,? she said. ?The burns were because they have open stoves in the house that are used for heating as well as cooking. A lot of kids of a young age are around the fire and accidents happen.?

Speaking of Isadoro, the boy with the double cleft palate, Mrs. Simmons-Wade said he was a different person after the surgery.

?Normally, they do the cleft palate on one trip and the lip on another,? she said. ?This time they did the cleft palate on the Monday and on the Friday they did the lip because it was just so deforming. I was wondering how he managed to eat.?

The hospital in the village was very small and only had 15 beds, two operating rooms and lots of flies. She said it left many Bermudian doctors and nurses appreciating King Edward VII Memorial Hospital.

?This project was funded by the local Rotarians,? she said. ?There is a significant difference in social class. The Rotarians are very rich and the others are very poor. The Rotarians saved all year for this mission. They provided the accommodation, the transportation and meals.

?There were 28 people in the team. The rest of the people came from Boston.?

While in their regular practices surgeons usually only do one or two surgeries a day, but in Salcedo, because they were only there for a short time and there was such a high need, the team worked from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. at night. Everyone pitched in, doing whatever needed to be done.

?I think that people have a tendency to rise to the occasion and the work within the parameters that they have,? she said. ?Surgeons were lifting the kids from the bed and handing them to their parents. Everybody was mopping and cleaning. There were things the doctors were doing that they would never have done in any other circumstances.?

The team carried out 81 procedures and saw about 270 patients.

?I did the interviews for all the patients with the doctor and interpreter,? said Mrs. Simmons-Wade. ?I had the opportunity to see every single patient who came through.?

While they waited to be seen, the Ecuadorians were very patient even though some would have to wait until next year, while others would have surgery and then be required to come back the next year for another surgery.

?With the burn patients one patient had ten surgeries,? said Mrs. Simmons-Wade. ?They kept coming back and coming back to get surgery for the patient.?

Mrs. Simmons-Wade helped to organise the patients and supplies, and also put together little care packages for each patient to take home. Most of their patients were children, so the care packages included Tylenol, pencils, erasers, rulers and toys.

?They were things that made the kids so excited,? she said. ?We took blankets for everyone because they didn?t have a lot of blankets. Everyone who had surgery had to have a blanket put on them afterward.?

Some of the problems being corrected were cosmetic, such as extra fingers or webbed fingers, but Mrs. Simmons-Wade said fixing such a difference could have a dramatic impact on a person?s life.

?There is discrimination there as well if you aren?t seen as within the norm,? she said. ?As a parent you don?t want your child to have this feature that can label them. The other thing that was very major was reconstruction of the ears. I wasn?t sure if that was genetic or nutrition, but there were a lot of people whose ears were not developed. Some of the ears looked like if they had been in the womb a little longer it would have folded back. So the doctors would cut it to release it. In some cases they literally had to take a skin graft from the patient?s stomach and build an ear. For many of the kids, there was this young boy in there who was a burn victim and they started off doing his eyes and then his nose and then his mouth, his ear. This year he went back and he had his second ear.

For him to get his second ear was wonderful.?

To Ecuador, the group had to fly to New York, then fly to Miami and then catch another plane to Quito, Ecuador.

?When we arrived in Quito there were buses waiting for us and we jumped on the buses,? she said. ?It was three hours and we went up into the mountains. When we arrived there was this sea of people waiting for us to come. They had been there for hours. The security guard parted the way through the crowd. We hadn?t even done anything, and it was so emotional.?

During the trip there was a high chance of getting altitude sickness. Many Project Change volunteers also became ill from drinking the water. Mrs. Simmons-Wade said she was lucky and didn?t experience any of this.

She said there was a tremendous outpouring of gratitude from the Ecuadorians. The medical team?s presence was a big deal in the small community, and they were interviewed by television and newspapers in the area.

?People were giving flowers and roses,? she said. ?They were crying over you. Kids were hugging you. What we did was life-changing surgery. Their lives will be different as the result of the surgery.?

Mrs. Simmons-Wade communicated with the patients using improvised sign language, but she hopes to learn more Spanish in time for next year?s trip.

The team also had fun and enjoyed what they were doing.

?There were all these people with Viagra hats,? she said. ?The hats were donated by different companies. Some of them had little rabbits on them and others had beer logos.

?In the operating rooms it was like fun. Everybody played all kinds of music, hip-hop, jazz, Bob Marley, Mozart. We had one person who was a surgeon who was also a medical illustrator. She would do the surgery, but she would also do cartoons of people and stick them up on the wall. Then we had a photographer going around taking very good pictures. It captured the country, the people and the mood.?

She said the Rotarians in the country were very good to them. The group sometimes stopped their operations at 8 p.m., but the Rotarians would still have something planned such as a dinner party or a trip to a discotheque.

Mrs. Simmons-Wade also said Ecuador itself is very beautiful.

?They had fabulous churches there,? she said. ?It is a very beautiful country. They had the most fabulous, vibrant, biggest roses you could see. They had so many colours of roses. Everything was so big. You realise just how fortunate we are. In our culture these problems would have been taken care of so early. It is not predominant but you don?t see anyone with it because it is taken care of at birth.?