Roma Downey Operation Quotations

There's an assumption in many of these cultures that these children are mentally retarded, when in fact they're not at all. I saw how the operation affects the child, as well as the child's family and often the village.

Operation Smile invites the local medical teams to try to learn the skills required. Their philosophy is that if you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he'll eat for his lifetime. They're really trying to show these local doctors how to... perform the operation.

In an interesting way, the operation becomes almost a metaphor for hope and optimism. A little child can have a new face with a smile restored, and suddenly his mother's smile is restored and his father's and the outer family's... and they bring him back to the village and the village is delighted... The ripples and effects of this are fantastic.