She came with a group by boat from a series of islands in the South China Sea, south of Nha Trang & Cam Ranh Bay. Reduced to subsistence living, this 39 year-old widow & mother of a 7 year-old son, came only with the hope that someone would repair her son's cleft lip (a procedure called "phau thuat moi" in Vietnamese). Her fisherman husband was lost at sea two years ago during a storm.

Side-by-side, she & her son stood waiting patiently during the FACE the Challenge screening at Phan Thiet Hospital (200 km east of Ho Chi Minh City) in the southernmost Vietnamese province, Binh Thuan. Her son complied with the obligatory probes & then was scheduled for surgery. But not until his mother, with no aspirations for herself, agreed to allow the team to repair her cleft lip, too! Assured that her son's surgery was a success, she yielded to the surgical team's insistence, & her surgery followed his. . . .