After two weeks of solo travel (or as I liked to call it: The Lifetime Original made-for-TV movie Rachel Discovers Herself in India), I made it to Guwahati, India for the Operation Smile medical mission.
Guwahati is east of Bangladesh, in a part of India I didn't realize was there.
Guwahati is a unique mission location because of the extremely large population of people with cleft lips and/or cleft palates. Because of this, Operation Smile is setting up a clinic for ongoing care for these patients. Until that gets going though, the missions in Guwahati are much larger than normal. During four weeks and with the help of two teams, we operated on 509 patients!
Guwahati is the capital of the state of Assam. The people speak Assamese or Hindi or (occasionally) English. I have only seen a very small portion of the very large country of India, but Guwahati was the most polluted of the cities I visited and the poverty was the most in-your-face here.
However, as always, the children were resilient and adorable.
she looks sweet here, but just moments before this picture she was attacking me with her panda doll
family before son's surgery
passing the time before surgery
Rachel Pillion 