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Our mission is to provide children suffering from
urgent medical conditions in under-resourced areas of the world
with the compassion and care that can heal them.
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HTCNE's Recent Accomp
lishments
HTCNE's Medical Teams Abroad has had a busy year providing urgently-needed care to over a thousand children in Bolivia, India, Colombia, and Peru. This care consisted primarily of surgeries to repair cleft lips and cleft palates, including treatment for speech pathologies resulting from these birth defects; other facial reconstructive procedures; plus oral surgeries and additional dental services.
The value of the surgical and medical care donated during our mission to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for example, totaled nearly $225,000; the value of donated dental care, nearly $58,000. The value of the Santa Cruz Team's healing skills to children with disfiguring conditions that kept them from functioning normally? Incalculable.
What's Next
This fall, a Team
of 35 medical professionals headed by NY facial reconstructive surgeon Dr. Andrew Jacono travels to Santa Marta, Colombia , where they'll perform procedures on approximately 70 children in just five days. A particular focus of this mission is treating children with microtia, a condition in which babies are born with congenitally small, malformed, or even absent external ears. After the surgeries, the Team's speech pathologists will help the children learn how to adjust their phonation to their augmented hearing (see story below.)
And this coming January, Drs. Manoj Abraham, Shaun Desai, and Matt Johnson lead HTCNE missions to Pune, Ujjain and Indore, India. More on these Medical Teams Abroad missions in our next e-newsletter.
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Making Healing Happen
: What You Can Do
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- Your donation in any amount helps to support HTCNE's mission. You can make a one- time donation or you can donate monthly on our secure website. Just click our website button, below.
- If you have colleagues, family, or friends you think might want to know about HTCNE, please forward this e-newsletter to them.
- There are other ways to become involved, too. For more information, please call 860-355-1828 or email us at htcne@htcne.org.
Thank you for everything you do t
o help heal the children!
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HEALING PROFILE:
Helen Buhler
About seven years ago, Helen Buhler told her graduate students in speech pathology that after she retired she was going to go work for Smile Train. But the program director of communication disorders at Dobbs Ferry, NY's Mercy College saw an article in the local newspaper that made her change her mind.
It was a story about Dr. Manoj Abraham, a Poughkeepsie, NY otolaryngologist and reconstructive facial surgeon , and the work of his HTCNE Medical/Surgical Team. As he talked movingly of his long involvement with HTCNE, Dr. Abraham added: "We're hoping we can find a speech pathologist to take with us on our next mission." Helen called him the next day, they spoke about his Team's needs, and that was that (although Helen didn't retire from Mercy.)
Helen's first mission with HTCNE's Medical Teams Abroad to Santa Marta, Colombia, began with a needs assessment for determining how best to provide remedial speech services to the children who were going to have cleft lip or cleft palate surgeries. She and fellow PhD in speech pathology Shari Berkowitz wanted to discover the most helpful way to work with children of this impoverished culture, many of whose families had few resources and little experience with health care providers.
As they listened with the help of a bilingual grad student and an interpreter to the families, it became clear to Helen and Shari that most of the children required more than just remedial speech services. Says Helen: "Our idea was to create a 'ripple effect' by working with the families, with local teachers and health care providers, and with speech professionals -- if any! We wanted to develop an all-around health plan for each child." Helen and Shari were to follow this holistic approach in all of their subsequent HTCNE missions.
Helen's speech team works with each child several times during the week-long visits, leaving simple print materials behind to help reinforce what has been done, and what needs to be continued at home. If the parents own a smart phone, Helen has them video-record the remedial speech sessions. This helps, Helen says, because, not all parents are literate, and so the materials are typically just diagrams and pictures.
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This November, Helen and Shari will join a Medical Teams Abroad mission to Santa Marta, Colombia, and they'll participate in the missions to Indore and Ujjain, India -- both new sites for HTCNE.
Says Helen: "We can't make the children's speech perfect, but we do help a great deal. And we can show their families how to take the next steps. It's extremely gratifying."
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About HTCNE
Healing The Children
Northeast grew out of the simple conviction that every child --no matter where or in what circumstances that child lives -- has a right to quality medical care.
In 1983, a Connecticut businesswoman, a pediatrician, and two
hospitals collaborated to identify children in urgent need of care from under-resourced areas of developing countries --especially children suffering from disfiguring and disabling birth defects.
Soon the core group began to assemble medical professionals who would travel abroad at their own expense to heal these children. From this beginning Healing The Children Northeast (HTCNE) evolved, and in 1985 was incorporated as a non-profit 501(c)3.
Since then, through its primary program Medical Teams Abroad, HTCNE has donated surgical, medical, and dental care with an estimated value of $70 million to nearly 50,000 children in seven countries. In 2015 alone, the market-value cost of the care donated was over $3.7 million. HTCNE continues to seek out doctors, nurses, dentists, and other medical personnel who want to reach out with hearts and hands to help heal the most vulnerable of children.
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Healing The Children Northeast, Inc.
860-355-1828 Phone 860-350-6634 Fax
htcne@htcne.org www.htcne.org
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