By Sarah Muckler | Worldwide Director of Marketing, Health Industry for Microsoft 

My seven-year-old niece is a beautiful, sweet girl who loves hugs and kisses and playing with all her friends from school. She’s also a stylish little thing with a smile that makes it impossible not to smile back.

You’d never know she was born with cleft palate.

Because she and her family have access to physicians and medical care, she was able to have the surgery needed to repair her cleft condition. In many countries, this would not have been the case.

Repairing a cleft lip or cleft palate can take as little as 45 minutes. We take access to surgeries like these for granted in places like Florida, where my niece lives. But it’s estimated that two billion people—or one-quarter of the world’s population—lack access to basic surgical care. Billions more lack access to surgery that’s safe and well-timed. That means many children live with cleft conditions for their entire lives. Unlike my niece, they struggle with eating, which can lead to malnourishment. And they’re often ostracized from society.

That’s why the work that Operation Smile does is so incredibly important.

The international medical charity was founded in 1982 by Dr. William Magee Jr., a plastic surgeon, and his wife, Kathleen Magee, a nurse and clinical social worker. Since then, it has provided more than 220,000 free surgical procedures for children and young adults born with cleft lip, cleft palate, and other facial conditions. What’s more, to build long-term sufficiency in resource-poor environments, Operation Smile trains doctors and local medical professionals in its partner countries so they’re empowered to treat their local communities. It also donates medical equipment and supplies and provides year-round medical treatments through its worldwide centers.

I feel very fortunate to have been invited to volunteer on one of Operation Smile’s medical missions in Vietnam this month, where it has an incredible history. It was the first US organization allowed into Vietnam when the US government was trying to resolve MIA/POW issues, according to Operation Smile. To learn the whole story, you can watch this powerful documentary — A Cure to War.

Operation Smile’s first medical mission to Vietnam was in 1989, when 100 patients were treated. Since then, it has healed tens of thousands of smiles in the country. Last year Operation Smile changed the lives of more than 700 patients in one week to mark its 25th anniversary of conducting missions in Vietnam.

Microsoft has been working with Operation Smile for years. And co-founder and CEO Dr. Bill Magee has written blogs such as this one about how Microsoft is helping Operation Smile dream big. And as part of Microsoft’s corporate citizenship, our mission is to serve globally the needs of the communities and fulfill our responsibilities to the public. By volunteering for a medical mission in Vietnam for Operation Smile, I was hoping to help achieve that goal.

My job at Microsoft has afforded me so many amazing opportunities, none of which I’m more excited about than going on an Operation Smile medical mission. I’ll be joining a local mission in Hanoi, where 90 surgeries are anticipated. For every child with cleft lip or cleft palate that I meet, I’ll be thinking of my niece. What if she couldn’t have gotten the surgery she needed? No child should have to suffer because of that what-if. The medical care that Operation Smile provides changes lives and I couldn’t feel more grateful for the opportunity to be part of it.

By the time this blog posts, I’ll have just returned from Vietnam, and I look forward to sharing my personal experience of the mission in another blog coming soon. 

Learn how you can get involved with Operation Smile here.

Microsoft has been teaming with Operation Smile for more than three years now. Their Mobile First, Cloud First strategy is perfectly aligned with Operation Smile technology imperatives and the context in which we conduct our work. Microsoft and partner solutions enable us to collect patient and other data offline in some very challenging environments with secure storage in the cloud where it is globally accessible for reporting and analytics. The personal dedication of numerous Microsoft executives in joining us on missions is further proof of Microsoft's commitment to our success.