I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while, but my mind is somewhere else… well, exactly 8,506 miles away (13,687 kilometers) and I can’t seem to be able to concentrate enough to write.
We are still waiting for our Embassy appointment and the anxiety is building up.
Anyway, I wanted to post something about an extraordinary project that some British doctors are responsible for.
It’s called Project Harar and was created by Jonathan Crown. While visiting Ethiopia, Crown encountered two boys with facial deformities and decided to create this project following the steps of the people of Facing Africa who work with NOMA patients.

The idea is to help people in Ethiopia who suffer some kind of facial deformity by performing high end surgeries to reconstruct their faces so they can live a normal life.
This is done not only for aesthetic purposes, but for health reasons too since many of these children or adults can’t sometimes eat or breathe normally and due to their physical appearance live secluded, don’t study, work or perform normal everyday activities.
Project Harar tries to send at least two missions per year to Ethiopia to identify future patients and perform surgeries. Precisely, this month of April, many Ethiopians are going to benefit from those interventions.
Project Harar treats people who have suffered from NOMA, burns, tumors, animal attacks, cleft palate, etc..
They have a web page where you can learn and donate to their project and also a blog that follows day by day the April 2012 mission.
I would also recommend to visit the Facing Africa website. This group of professionals specifically treat people victims of NOMA in several countries of Africa including Ethiopia. NOMA is a terrible disease that kills 90% of those who contract it and leaves the other 10% with terrible facial deformities.
The BBC made a great documentary about Facing Africa, but I must warn you that some of the images are disturbing to watch.
Don’t turn away from those faces, behind those crude images are real people suffering who terribly need our help.

Project Harar website
Project Harar Blog
Facing Africa NOMA
BBC documentary

AliciA