Celebrating Our Volunteers
It is a tradition, at the end of a medical mission, to gather together the “team” – that group of extraordinary people who came together to deliver new smiles to…
Volunteer Stories
Mozambique
Open heart, open hands
Without its global network of selfless, caring and generous volunteers, Operation Smile simply wouldn’t exist. The organization’s free, life-changing cleft surgeries are only made possible by people who unite from…
Colombia
Treating the whole patient: psychologist Andrea Díaz
Operation Smile believes in offering the most comprehensive care possible at our medical missions and care centers around the world. After more than three decades of listening to the emotional…
Ghana
Healing more patients than ever
From Cape Coast to Koforidua, the Operation Smile Ghana team has rapidly changed the way people living in the most remote and impoverished places in the country are accessing cleft…
Canada
Dr. Rodrigo Neira speaks from the heart
I joined Operation Smile in 1991 when I was a plastic surgery resident back in Colombia. Operation Smile was much smaller back then, and I had the opportunity to get…
Canada
Canada’s student leaders
This July, ten Canadian high school student leaders joined hundreds of other students from around the world at Operation Smile’s 27th Annual International Student Leadership Conference in Seattle. At this…
Ghana
The extra mile
Before Sabrina Ghiddi became involved with Operation Smile’s work in Ghana as a nonmedical volunteer in 2013, she didn’t know that the organization existed. However, the Italian transplant did know…
Ghana
A pioneer’s impact
Dr. Opoku Ampomah walks side by side with his patient, 17-year-old Faustina, down the corridor that leads to the operating rooms at Eastern Regional Hospital in Koforidua, Ghana. It’s the…