Smiles Reborn, Lives Transformed

Since 1969, the nonprofit group Interplast has helped 37,000 youngsters in developing countries receive free reconstructive surgery to treat cleft lips or palates and severe burns or other crippling injuries.

The charity, in Mountain View, Calif., manages a network of 1,200 medical volunteers from the United States who donate their time to help youngsters in a dozen countries. In addition to performing surgery, the volunteers train local doctors and nurses so they can keep up with new surgical techniques and related care.

Interplast says that, thanks to donations of time and equipment, it spends only $700 to perform each operation, compared to the $5,000 or more that such surgeries typically cost in the United States.

To help people visualize how the charity has transformed the lives of children, Interplast asked the photographer Phil Borges to document two trips — one to Cuzco, Peru, and the other to two Vietnamese cities, Quang Ngai and Hoi An.

Mr. Borges says he was drawn to the project, which resulted in a book called The Gift, for many reasons — including his 18 years’ practice as an orthodontist. He says all the children he treated in the United States had their cleft palates attended to within a year of birth; in the developing world, he says, many live well into adulthood with the deformity.

Though it is common to see untreated adults in developing countries, many adults still must deal with the stigma of the disfigurement. In Vietnam, he writes in the book’s introduction, “people believe that if a pregnant woman merely looks at someone with a cleft, her unborn baby will catch the affliction.” In Peru, he writes, “congenital facial abnormality is considered to be the result of a previous sin of the mother.”

Mr. Borges writes that the title of the book refers not just to the gift to the patient, but the gift that the medical volunteers receive when they help others. “When the medical teams go home,” he writes, “they leave with gratitude from their patients — and with renewed gratitude for their own lives.”