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It was a fundraising television commercial for the nonprofit Operation Smile, which sends volunteer teams of medical professionals around the world to repair cranial or facial disorders, that led Elisabeth Ward, a full-time lecturer and licensed speech-language therapist in CSULB's Communicative Disorders Department, to offer her services to the organization.
She is preparing to go this summer on her fourth medical mission, this time to Ethiopia, following previous work in Morocco and North Vietnam.
One child in about every 500-700 is born with a cleft lip or palate, which can cause severe speech and eating problems and social stigma. "The mission for them is to complete as many cleft palate and lip surgeries as possible, usually within a five-day period," Ward explained. The international organization serves 51 countries to provide craniofacial repairs and train in-country medical staff to take over the work.
A typical mission may see as many as 400 prospective patients who are screened by surgeons, nurses, dentists, social workers and speech pathologists who select about 150 for surgery. "We evaluate their speech, hearing and language and whether the children are speaking at all." Many children don't go to school because of their problems, Ward explained.
Families learn about speech development and even how to feed their children. "It's a lot about education because most of these countries don't have speech-language pathologists, or they're often inaccessible," Ward said. "A lot of parents think that because children have holes in their faces, they're never going to speak and they don't even talk to them very much, assuming that is their fate."
Because of a lack of medical services, many patients are adults, Ward said. "It's amazing what can happen. Most of these cleft lip surgeries take about 40 minutes and you have six surgeons completing about 150 surgeries, which is unbelievable. They pretty much work around the clock. The cleft palates can take over an hour. One minute you see a child with a cleft and the next minute the child looks wonderful and the family is so thrilled. A lot of the cosmetic changes are so important to these families because in some cultures, these children don't go outside the home or go to school. Many of them don't marry, so this one change is like a snowball effect. It changes the family's life and the child's life."
At CSULB, Ward teaches courses on voice and language disorders and also oversees communicative disorders master's students who work in the department's Speech, Language, and Hearing Clinic that offers a variety of services for children and adults in the greater Long Beach area. "Cal State Long Beach has probably one of the most extensive clinic programs because graduate students have to go through seven clinics before they graduate and then they have to do external clinics," followed by a nine-month supervised fellowship before obtaining their state license. The clinic provides evaluation and therapy for people with language or hearing problems and offers support groups for adults.
Ward wants to broaden student volunteer opportunities, including possibly working with CSULB's Isabel Patterson Child Development Center and the Child and Family Center in Consumer and Family Sciences. "Our students are really getting more involved in community service through the faculty," she said.
"One of the criteria for getting into the graduate program is that the students have either volunteered or worked in different environments and shown that they're more than just a person with a good grade point average. When I look at the applications, I'm always amazed at what the students have done."
For more information about CSULB's Speech, Language, and Hearing Clinic, visit www.csulb.edu/colleges/chhs/departments/communicative-disorders/services.
Above, Elisabeth Ward works with a child at an Operation Smile North Vietnam clinic.
