Springfield photographer documents life-changing dental mission

Operation Smile photographer Terry Farmer and a young friend smile for the camera, showing that children everywhere respond to positive attention.

Terry Farmer, owner of Terry Farmer Photography, Inc. in Springfield, spent nine days in Santa Cruz, Bolivia this spring, capturing life-changing transformations made possible through Operation Smile. Operation Smile is a worldwide medical charity dedicated to helping children and young adults born with cleft lips, cleft palates and other facial deformities.

Farmer, who is a parishioner at Springfield's St. Agnes Parish, was chosen to photograph the mission after he was recognized as the largest donor to the Operation Smile campaign sponsored by Professional Photographers of America Charities. In partnership with 23 area dentists, the Terry Farmer Photography group contributed $8,100 toward the $52,000 total raised nationwide during the 2007 fund-raising drive.

Each partner dentist, many whom are members of area Catholic parishes, contributed the price of at least one Operation Smile surgery. Their patients and other area residents were invited to participate in Operation Smile through a direct contribution or by scheduling a family portrait with Terry Farmer Photography last October, which was designated by PPA Charities as Family Portrait Month.

Surgery candidates were screened several days before the surgeries, which were performed during a two-day period. In between the screening and surgeries the families stayed in a residential shelter. Some of the patients spent the better part of two days in the hospital waiting, dressed in hospital gowns. Operation Smile provided the children with small colorful quilts to help them and their parents recall the life-changing day.

Most of the Operation Smile patients are children and young people, however this grandmother (in the hat) wanted surgery so that she could smile unashamed at her five children and eight grandchildren.

The surgeries took place at Hospital Japones, a 200-bed medical facility that was originally financed and supported by the Japanese Government. The volunteer team came from the United States, Canada, Ecuador and Honduras to work with Bolivian counterparts.

The professional team included plastic surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, a dentist and a psychiatrist. Additionally, teen volunteers played with the children, talked to them about nutrition and fire safety and even fashioned post-surgery braces to keep the young patients from disturbing their surgery sites.

Altogether, over 120 patients underwent surgeries, which were performed simultaneously (five at a time) in surgery suites for 12 hours each day. Because there were not enough surgical lights for all of the operations, some of the surgeons worked by flashlight.

Farmer took 4,000 photos on his mission. He says he took about 1,400 on his first day in Bolivia. "Although I had been a medical photographer intern earlier in my career, each surgery completed in Santa Cruz, through Operation Smile, struck me as a small miracle in a city and for a people whose lives had lacked many positive life-changing experiences," Farmer says.

"The thought that overwhelmed every day was, ‘We're so fortunate in the United States, so very blessed,'" he says. "We may not be able to afford superior medical care, but we seldom face the extra burden of how to reach a doctor.

"When I saw families traveling in horse-drawn carts on dirt streets through the city, I wondered how our families reached us, and how long it took," he says. "When we travel as families, most parents pack toys and snacks to keep their children occupied. There were none of those at Hospital Japones. And yet the children were as affectionate as they are in my neighborhood, which made their enthusiastic hugs and smiles all the more heartwarming."

Farmer says he'll never forget the people he met or worked with in Bolivia - whether they were patients, parents or the volunteers. "The volunteers treated every patient as if they were treating a family member," he says. "Recording the faces of children and their families is what photographers do, and Operation Smile has been the perfect charity with which we could partner with area dentists. Together this collaboration has forever changed the lives of so many children in need."