Making them smile

At his practice in Newport Beach, plastic surgeon Mark Anton has been doing nose jobs and tummy tucks for more than 20 years, but on a recent medical relief trip to Haiti, he closed the wounds on newly amputated limbs and performed skin grafts on earthquake victims.

Anton just spent two weeks in the remote Haitian village of Hinche, three hours outside of Port-au-Prince, with a team of doctors and nurses from the nonprofit group Operation Smile.

The experience has left Anton with a desire to do more humanitarian work.

“I don’t know who got more out of it, them or me,” Anton said.

It would have taken Anton and the Operation Smile medical team about 13 hours to travel overland from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to Hinche — without the help of actor Harrison Ford, an experienced pilot off-screen.

Indiana Jones himself flew Anton and the team of 20 medical professionals from Santo Domingo to Hinche in his private plane.

The actor was in Haiti to help with relief efforts.

Ford had to fly over the dirt airstrip in Hinche twice, once to warn the people, goats, dogs and chickens to move out of the way before landing.

Anton estimated that he and the Operation Smile team operated on 35 patients in a small rural hospital with limited supplies over the course of his stay.

Co-founded in 1982 by plastic surgeon William Magee, Operation Smile mostly focuses on providing free surgeries to children in developing countries who are born with cleft palates, but the organization put together a team of doctors to help with relief efforts in Haiti after the earthquake.

“This was very different from what Operation Smile usually does,” said Lois Ephraim, a filmmaker who travels with Operation Smile to document its missions and who went to Haiti with Anton. “This was very frontline emergency treatment. It was amazing to see surgeons who are used to working in lovely facilities working in less-than desirable conditions, but there were no prima donnas — they were doing what needs to be done.”

Anton marveled at how well Haitians with amputated limbs and broken bones were healing in less-than-sterile makeshift hospitals.

He visited a tent hospital with dirt floors where, weeks after the earthquake, Haitians were recovering from horrible injuries in conditions no more sanitary than a camp ground.

Some of the Haitians he saw had broken bones that were never set and had started to grow back together, off-kilter, with no medical treatment.

“It just goes to show you the resilience of the human body,” he said. “They’re just sitting there with open wounds and they’re not infected; they’re fine.”

Many of the patients Anton saw were recovering from severe crush injuries after buildings crumbled around them during the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that shook Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12.

Most people who got hit in the head and torso with pieces of falling concrete during the earthquake died, Anton said.

Those who survived had injuries to their lower bodies, such as shattered femurs and crushed lower legs.

Anton also helped Haitians who were not earthquake victims, but were still in need of medical care.

He performed skin grafts on two babies who where severely burned from a kerosene lamp, and helped perform reconstructive surgery on a woman with severe scar tissue on her face from an old acid burn.

“Haiti is a very poor nation, but it strikes you that there is no disparity of happiness and goodness in people there,” Anton said. “Kids fly kites made out of old sticks. They go to church and seem basically happy.”

How To Help

Donations for Operation Smile can be made at www.operationsmile.org. Or text SMILE to 90999 to make a $5 donation to Operation Smile for Haitian relief efforts.