Every treatment we provide changes the lives of a patient and their loved ones. Our patients are often children who do not understand why they have it so much harder in many respects than their playmates and friends. So it is all the more touching for us when we get a chance to see how these children are living their lives after their operation. One such case is that of the twins Wilian and Yeison Quispe from Peru. Our long-time Peruvian partner, surgeon Dr. Alberto Bardales, visited them at their home recently, seven years after their last surgery.
Wilian and Yeison live with their parents Fredy and Eliza at an altitude of 3,328 m in the rural community of Huacapunco in the Andean district of Colquepata in the southeast of our project country Peru. They are descendants of South American indigenous people who speak Quechua instead of Spanish. They make their living from agriculture, breeding sheep, guinea pigs and chickens. Once a week, Fredy rides his bicycle to the village to sell produce at the market. Most of the people in this remote region three hours from Cusco are very poor and live in the simplest of conditions. The houses are made of mud, the water comes from a river. The winters are cold and uncomfortable.
Eliza tells Dr. Bardales the family’s story: when the couple learns that Eliza is pregnant, they are very excited about their first child. They are not able to go to the hospital for check-ups – there is none locally, and the trip to the city is long and expensive. Eliza’s pregnancy goes smoothly, but her belly gets bigger and bigger. They start to suspect they may be expecting twins. They go to the hospital for the birth in July 2013 – very fortunate for both mother and children: The twins have to be delivered by cesarean section.
All goes well, but mixed in with the relief is shock: the babies have “mouths split in half.” The diagnosis: both boys have a bilateral cleft lip and a severe cleft palate.
“We thought that lightning had struck our children, or witchcraft… we didn’t know what to do. Wilian and Yeison couldn’t drink milk properly. They cried a lot… we suffered a lot. We were desperate. We asked the doctors and they told us that it was a malformation called cleft lip and palate and that there was a solution and that help would come. Some people in the community and in the city told us to hide Wilian and Yeison and even abandon them. We covered their faces so that no one could see them. We were very sad… we cried a lot.”
– Eliza Quispe, Wilian und Yeison’s mother
Eliza and Fredy cry a lot and are afraid that Wilian and Yeison might die. At the local health clinic, nurses show Eliza special feeding techniques for babies with cleft lip and palate. “Little by little, we learned how to feed them…and our babies gained weight.”
Now that the immediate danger has passed, Eliza and Fredy can think about what to do next. The local clinic registers Wilian and Yeison as cleft patients. Mitsee, a psychologist from our partner organization Qorito, meets with Fredy in Cusco. She tells him about our aid program and gives him a date when the Qorito team will come to Cusco from Lima to treat Wilian and Yeison.
“We traveled by bus to the regional hospital in Cusco. They explained everything to us calmly and in our Quechua language. We just hoped for our babies to get help.”
In 2014 and 2015, our surgeon Dr. Alberto Bardales successfully closed the babies’ cleft lips and palates. “Their wounds healed… and they could smile and so could we,” Eliza tells us with relief. “We also got advice from the psychologists and speech therapists, and we were very happy for their help. Now we and our children are happy. We live as a family here in the village. I want to thank God and the Peruvian doctors of Qorito and the people from Germany (DCKH) for their support… thank you for helping our people.”
Since the surgeries, the children have integrated well into the community and are no longer marginalized. Thanks to the skilled surgeon, nothing remains visible of their clefts today. The twins have developed well and go to school in a village nearby on foot. On the day Dr. Bardales visits, they happened to have stayed home to tend the sheep and help their parents with the oat harvest.
Like many cleft patients, Wilian and Yeison would benefit from speech therapy to improve their pronunciation. Speech therapy is part of a comprehensive cleft therapy, which we work towards offering in all of our project countries. Their teeth are also in very poor condition, which is unfortunately very common in the region, even in children born without clefts. During Dr. Bardale’s latest aid mission in Cusco, shortly after his visit, a dentist has now also treated the twins’ teeth.
Wilian and Yeison are now nine years old and can look forward to living a normal life – a life that is not possible for many children with untreated clefts. We rejoice with them and the many children like them whom we have been able to help so far. For making this possible, we thank our many doctors, therapists and organizers in the project countries and, of course, our many many donors in Germany and around the world.
