Project Boomerang is a voluntary program consisting of health care specialists and lay people with  a kindred passion to help children with a congenital orofacial cleft.  These unfortunate children in SE Asia may never get any if all appropriate and complete treatment of their congenital or acquired deformity.

Children with orofacial cleft conditions often cannot hear, swallow, eat, thrive, interact and smile; therefore a cleft can affect daily family and social life, interactions at school and any attempts at normality.  Orofacial clefts are a most common birth defect and many cleft children are born each year as a recurring human situation.  Far too many children in SE Asia cannot obtain early intervention and necessary follow-up care that establishes and improves a child`s life, from a near optimal start.

Cleft treatments are multi-disciplinary and require a serialised approach to care over a lengthy period of a child and adolescent`s life into young adulthood.  As such, specialist treatments for clefts are often prohibitively expensive for the high numbers of disadvantaged individuals in the SE Asian region.

“ Project Boomerang ” volunteers have been supporting and improving the existing infrastructure and undertaking preliminary education of our SE Asian health care workers; in order that they understand how to fully manage all contemporary treatment protocols of children with cleft and facial anomalies and ensuing psycho-social consequences.

SE Asian families with cleft children cannot afford to pay for any, nor all specialist treatments.  Even when specialist treatments are available; it will be only at a considerable distance from their living situation and moreover,  the services and treatments will not be fully available; something we simply take for granted in the first, developed world.

After many trips by a core team of “ Project Boomerang ” volunteers to SE Asia and in particular, Vietnam since 2000 … it is now understood that more than twenty five thousand children have pressing and urgent treatment needs to manage their congenital cleft condition in this region.  Unfortunately, whenever a cleft is surgically repaired in SE Asia; follow-up care and management are not always done adequately: such that a  successfully surgically corrected cleft can be undone.