By MARK WAITE – Pahrump Valley Times

Many people have seen the heart-breaking videos of children with cleft palates peering at them on television in fundraising appeals for charity.

Belinda Felton, a dental hygienist at Pahrump Family Dental, saw a video on Rotaplast International, a non-profit, humanitarian organization founded in 1992 as a world community service project of the Rotary Club. A Rotary Club district governor spoke to the Pahrump Rotarians about a mission he took to help children with cleft palates.

Felton was hooked.

“Being in dentistry it was very near and dear to my heart,” Felton said.

When Pahrump Valley Rotary Club President Vern Van Winkle said a Rotaplast group needed a non-medical volunteer, Felton asked how she could sign up. She leaves Sunday for a village in Guatemala.

“I will be gone 12 days, seven days of which will be cleft palate surgeries. We’ll probably do surgeries on 100 children, 12-hour days at the hospital. I’m going to be an assistant in the recovery room after the surgery is over,” Felton said.

It’s rare to see children with cleft palates in America, but it’s more common in poor countries like Guatemala.

“A lot people here in the states don’t really know that much about it because here it’s usually corrected at birth or at a very early age. So people aren’t really used to seeing that. But they conceivably will be doing surgeries on older, school age children that never had the opportunity to do that,” Felton said.

“It’s a cleft palate and it can be either unilateral to one side or both sides. The roof of your mouth never really closes, so it’s open to your nose. That makes it difficult eating, drinking, it’s very physically disfiguring. A lot of these children may never attend school because of it,” she said.

The Pahrump Valley Rotary Club raised money for her airfare, which she had to pay herself as a non-medical volunteer.

“A lot of the families truly hide away these children because they believe God has punished them somehow,” Felton said.