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

These essential materials are designed to equip children in countries around the world who are undergoing life-changing surgery to correct facial deformities.

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

Operation Smile’s official website states that a crevice is a gap in the mouth that did not close in the early stages of pregnancy. As a result, children born with cleft disease may have an opening in the lip or roof of the mouth – or both. A child is born every three minutes with a cleft lip or cleft palate. That is around 175,000 children worldwide every year. Without corrective surgery, up to nine in ten children born with these conditions could die.

Operation Smile conducts its missions in low and middle income countries where children can take years to receive 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, had traveled to the Philippines with a group of medical volunteers to repair cleft lip and cleft palates in children. Failing to treat all of the children who needed the surgery, they formed the charity to raise funds and bring together volunteers to offer free cleft lip and palate surgeries to 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 in the United States are repaired during early childhood. Affected children in other countries are not so lucky. Most of the children in the countries that qualify for the surgery come from families with extremely limited resources. As a result, they often arrive without changing clothes or accessories suitable for surgery and recovery. This is the need that the VIA volunteers decided to meet.

Rehoboth Beach’s Village Improvement Association is a nonprofit and a unique women’s civic and nonprofit organization that includes members of all ages and backgrounds. Since its inception in 1909, VIA members have used their collective efforts to make lasting personal and financial contributions to the city of Rehoboth Beach and the surrounding communities.