The Statutory Mission
Emergenza Sorrisi is a non-profit organisation, a-political, non partisan and independent, created with the aim of giving a smile and hope of a better life to children living in the poorest and most disadvantaged countries, with major facial malformations, burns, war trauma, neoplasms, eye and paediatric pathologies.
Intervention areas
1) Our objective is to perform surgery or give medical care to children suffering from cleft palate (‘hare lip’).
2) Moreover in the medium-long term we aim at creating excellence centres in the countries hosting our missions; in the lead for treating labio-palatoplasty and other facial malformations, where teams of local doctors can operate autonomously, after being trained by our staff.
3) Emergenza Sorrisi also operates in cases of major humanitarian emergencies, both national and international, as in Haiti after the disastrous earthquake.
Short, Medium and Long Term Impact
In completing surgery on children with malformation and burns and receiving aid, Emergenza Sorrisi helps them to:
- solve the problem in the short term, because the malformation decreases and then is brought to normal levels;
- solve the more complex problem of social absorption; a child with a facial pathology is rejected, considered different, and becomes a victim of "heavenly curses";
We also intervene at a cultural level, as we explain to heads of the villages and to elders that surgery is the only way to heal children, and that they are not at all guilty for the physical condition.
Another objective by this single gesture, is to improve the child's life as a whole.