VIA volunteers support Operation Smile 

For the second year in a row, volunteers from the Village Improvement Association of Rehoboth Beach Health and Wellness Committee created and delivered boxes of blankets, hospital gowns, smile bags and smile bag contents to the global headquarters of Operation Smile in Virginia Beach, Va.

These essential materials are destined to equip children in countries all over the world who will undergo life-changing surgery to correct facial deformities.

To make this happen, a small committee of the VIA led by Mary J. Sparks corralled more than 50 industrious and compassionate women members to make kits for the children. The club’s Caring Stitchers group knitted blankets, and two area quilting groups donated many items. In the end, they assembled goods worth more than $4,000. The core group packaged the kits and hundreds of supplies into boxes, then loaded up April Irelan’s truck with the finished goods. Sparks, Irelan, Sharron Ferrara and Nancy Cirelli drove them to the Virginia Beach headquarters.

Operation Smile’s official website says a cleft is a gap in the mouth that didn't close during the early stages of pregnancy. As a result, children born with a cleft condition may have an opening in the lip or the roof of their mouth – or both. Every three minutes, a child is born with a cleft lip or cleft palate. Annually, that is about 175,000 children worldwide. Without corrective surgery, as many as nine in 10 children born with these conditions could die.

Operation Smile conducts its missions in low- and middle-income countries, where it can take years for children to get treatment. The organization was originally founded in 1982 after Dr. William P. Magee Jr., a plastic surgeon, and his wife Kathleen, a nurse and clinical social worker, traveled to the Philippines with a group of medical volunteers to repair children's cleft lips and cleft palates. They could not begin to treat all the children who needed the surgery, so they created the charity to raise funds and assemble volunteers to provide free cleft lip and palate surgeries for children and young adults around the world.

Although cleft conditions, known as orofacial defects, are one of the four most common birth defects in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most clefts are repaired during early childhood in the U.S. Affected children in other countries are not so fortunate. Most of the children in those countries who do qualify for the surgery come from families with extremely limited resources, so they often arrive without even a change of clothing or supplies suitable for surgery and recovery. That is the need the VIA volunteers decided to fill.

The Village Improvement Association of Rehoboth Beach is a nonprofit organization, and a unique women’s civic and charitable organization comprising members of all ages and backgrounds. Since its founding in 1909, VIA members have been harnessing their collective powers to make enduring personal and financial contributions to the town of Rehoboth Beach and surrounding communities.