http://www.smh.com.au/world/young-lives-transformed-by-plastic-surgery-team-20100312-q46t.html
Young lives transformed by plastic surgery team TOM ALLARD March 13, 2010 Andian Lannga was just a year old, asleep, when his life changed forever. His mother, Yuliana, had left him to doze in their wooden and bamboo home while she went to the well to fetch water to prepare the evening meal. The trip to the well was long. Their village, like so many on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, was built on a rocky outcrop far from the water supply. It makes them secure from attacks from rival clans or, in days past, the slave traders who prized Sumba's sturdy people as commodities. When Yuliana returned from her five-kilometre round journey, she found her home had caught fire, with Andian inside. ''I was too late to bring him out from the burning house,'' she said. ''We took him to the hospital but just for two days. The oxygen was not working and he had a seizure. They told us to go home.'' Few expected the boy to survive. Remarkably, he did. But, with his left side badly burnt and untreated, the scar tissue formed a contracture that fused his wrist to his shoulder. For five years Andian struggled with the pain and the embarrassment. He could not play with other children. He tried going to school but lasted just six days. ''All the children said 'Poor him, poor him,''' Yuliana said. ''All the teachers say 'Poor him', too. He was too ashamed to go back to school.'' As he lay in his hospital bed last week, gently weeping as Andrew Broadhurst touched his straightened arm and checked his hand feeling and movement, Andian's prospects were a lot better. The skin graft performed a day earlier had been a success, one of many done by a team of Australian plastic surgeons in a remote West Sumba hospital over the past three weeks. A venture between the Australian and New Zealand charity Interplast and the Sumba Foundation, a local aid organisation founded by the long-time Sumba resident Claude Graves, it has helped dozens of children undergo life-transforming operations in a makeshift theatre. ''We usually do a couple of burns a day, and four to six cleft lips and palates,'' said Dr Broadhurst, a Queensland plastic surgeon whose working days in Australia are typically filled with cosmetic procedures for well-off clients. Sumba's heat can be intense and the hospital is basic. Splints have to be obtained from a nearby building site. And the anaesthetists have their work cut out. The children who turn up with their parents are fragile, are invariably malnourished and in many cases have respiratory problems and high fevers from malaria. ''The kids are great,'' Dr Broadhurst said. ''The operations are relatively straightforward but can lead to a massive change in people's lives.'' Two days after his operation Andian was in better spirits, high-fiving the Australian doctors and nurses. ''He wants to return to school now,'' Yuliana said, her face lighting up. ''We are very happy.''
