Posts Tagged ‘United States’
1st Annual Michigan Adobo Cook Off for Smile Train
Grand Haven, MI –
Get your pots and pans ready and your stomachs growling.
The First Annual Michigan Adobo Cook Off for Smile Train is coming up in less than a month! Hosted by Matt and Luchi Nelson, all proceeds from the Adobo Cook Off will be donated to Smile Train to benefit children born with cleft lips and palates.
On August 27th, competitors will proudly showcase their culinary skills for the bragging rights that come with the title of Michigan’s Best Adobo chef. Lucky judges and attendees will be treated to amazing entries in both the classic style and modern creative twists to an old favorite.
Don’t know how to make the traditional Filipino dish? Check out the video below from Madeline Nelson and try your hand at a homemade delicacy:
While your Adobo is cooking, be sure to browse through these photos of lucky children who have been helped by Smile Train and remember that the proceeds of the Adobo Cook Off will be going to pay for free cleft surgery for others just like them.
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One Million Kicks For Smiles
New Jersey – On Sunday, April 10, over 1,000 people gathered to watch and participate in Martial Arts With Heart‘s One Million Kicks for Smiles fundraising event. The karate exposition and challenge was hosted by the charitable arm of the United TaeKwonDo Academy. Competitors and students of all ages brought forth their skills in the culmination of their year long fundraising efforts.
The martial arts exposition featured demonstrations by masters and their students as well tests of skill including the group breaking 2,000 wood boards in under 5 minutes.
Throughout the year the students were able to raise nearly $50,000 , presenting a check to Smile Train’s own Anna Lawrence that will provide nearly 200 surgeries for children that would otherwise never be able to smile!
Smile Train would like to give a special thank you to Bryan Klein, Dr. Nicholas Despotidis, Greg and Laura Saxon, Brienne Alfano, and all of the students, families, volunteers, and donors who made this wonderful event and so many new smiles possible through their hard work, dedication, commitment, and generosity.
Medical Exchange Program
Smile Train is dedicated to empowering local medical professionals by giving them as much access to resources and training as possible. One example is through Smile Train’s Medical Exchange Program – this program provides support to our local partners so they can invite specialists in cleft from around the world to provide one-on-one training in areas that they need most. These specialists can be surgeons, anesthesiologists, speech pathologists, audiologists, dentists or orthodontists, and Smile Train provides small travel stipends for these professionals to visit our partners and provide one-on-one training and assistance. One recent example of this program was written about in Audiology Online…
BHARTI KATBAMNA: Yes. I am a professor at Western Michigan University. I have been at Western since 1995 and teach primarily in the area of diagnostic audiology. My clinical work also involves neurodiagnostics – I see predominantly pediatric patients from the normal nursery or the neonatal intensive care unit or from the hematology/ oncology clinics from hospitals in the greater Kalamazoo area.
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In my case, it was my colleague, Donna Oas, a retired speech-language pathologist, with expertise is cleft palate and lip, who made all the initial inquiries. She came to me with this book and said that she would like to go to India to do some charity work with the cleft team – since India is an English speaking country, she thought it would be the place of choice. India is a very large country and I was not familiar with almost any of the hospitals listed in the book, so we narrowed it down by selecting programs in big cities. She sent emails to several programs – most programs responded, but the most enthusiastic response came from Dr. Partha Sadhu, the plastic surgeon from the J. Watumull Global Hospital and Research Center in Mount Abu, located in the northwestern state of Rajasthan in India. As a Smile Train partner, Dr. Sadhu had hosted many visitors including ENTs and several speech-language pathologists from the U.K. and Sweden, so he was familiar with the process and that made everything very easy. Mt. Abu is a small hilltop community, but the hospital provides extensive services to the greater Rajasthan areas covering a 250-400 mile radius, serving people even from other states who must commute long distances to receive services in Mt. Abu.
So that is how the process began and I am not sure when in the process I seamlessly became Donna’s partner, but I did and it was fun to be a speech pathologist/audiologist team. It worked out beautifully and I am glad I went. It was a great opportunity to serve and learn; we saw 55 cases in a short span of seven days. They were very interesting cases – from cases that received repeat repairs due to poor repair work elsewhere, but handled skillfully by Dr. Sadhu, to new cases that received care from Dr. Sadhu from the beginning.
