This year Catherine Crowley and her team accompanied Healing the Children surgical mission to Neiva, Columbia. Healing the children is not a typical cleft palate repair mission. Traditionally, a cleft palate team would travel to a developing country and do many dozens of cleft lip and palate repairs and then return to their home country. However, a child with a repaired cleft lip or palate actually requires onoing therapy, monitoring and often further surgery in order for the repair to be successful. Without this type of long-term support, many children do not learn to talk intelligibly, despite the repair and can even develop fistulas (holes) as they grow. Healing the Children instead conducts annual trips back to Neiva. This was their 21st trip and Cate’s 2nd trip back. They work with the same patients each year while providing therapy and further surgery, including later revisions, bone augmentation and orthodonture.
Cate’s team was there for the second year and offered a 5 day training course for fonoaudiologists (speech therapists). The fonoaudiologists learned the specific knowledge and skills they will need to provide quality services to children with repaired cleft palate.Classes were given in the morning and then the clinicians provided services, including language stimulation, in the afternoon to patients.
We were invited to bring the speech component to the 20th anniversay of the Healing the Children surgical mission in Neiva, Colombia. With our colleagues, Dr. David Hoffman (medical director) and Dr. Sidney Eisig and a team of 70 surgeons, orthodontists, pediatricians, nurses, and medical records we were together June 5 to 12, 2013. We gathered a team of Miriam Baigorri, Jayne Miranda, Jessica Baquero, and students Theresa Donohue, Carla Montoya, and Kirea Crowley from Teachers College Columbia University. We invited 16 Colombian-based SLPs (fonoaudiologists) to join us in a cleft palate speech and feeding 5-day intensive course. We had a great group of Colombian SLPs. I knew that the Colombian programs were strong because I have met many who were students in the Bilingual Extension Institute. 
