At the beginning of this year I joined Operation Smile in Beira, Mozambique. I came on board as a photojournalist to document the process from beginning to end. it was a wonderful experience, one I hope to repeat soon and all the people involved in making this mission possible are increddible- thank you for making me part of your team. 

Operation Smile is an international children's medical charity that performs safe, effective cleft lip and cleft palate surgery, and delivers postoperative and ongoing medical therapies to children in low and middle income countries. Every three minutes, a child is born with a cleft, an opening in the lip, the roof of the mouth or the soft tissue in the back of the mouth where the exact cause is still unknown. A cleft lip or cleft palate operation and follow up care costs approximately R5500 and in as little as 45 minutes, one cleft lip surgery can change a child's life forever.

I wanted to put up the entire post of pictures on my website www.lindamarkovina.com as I participated in this project in my own capacity as a photojournalist, that and there were so many pictures that they did not all fit into a blog post , but were ore suitable for a gallery- and I could not resist showing as many off as I could.