Amy Petrocy recently completed her practicum with Partner for Surgery. She is in her second and final year at Ohio State getting my Masters of Public Health.

She was with us for two months this summer, primarily working with our Targeted Infant Nutrition Program (TINP) and and Cervical Cancer Prevention (CCP) program. In this picture, she cradles a child who was born with severe cleft lip and palate, and who was so malnourished he was was unable to be a candidate for corrective surgery. Thanks to the TINP, he has started to grow ad gain weight, and will be able to get the surgery he needs.  

Latin America lost nearly 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 square miles) of forest — an area larger than the state of Oregon — between 2001 and 2010, finds a new study that is the first to assess both net forest loss and regrowth across the Caribbean, Central and South America. Guatemala is the second to the worst hit (see chart below). 

This disturbing trend can be more closely watched thanks to geo-mapping. Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0819-latin-america-deforestation.html#ixzz246KiAFNS http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0819-latin-america-deforestation.html

It is hard for most of us to imagine living a life like this:

Was he born this way? No! This happened when he was innocently helping his Mom hang wet clothes on the rooftop of her employer's house. He hung his on  a live wire by mistake. His skin melted and fused, and the scar tissue resulted in his arm being like this. 

He is lucky to be alive, of course, but unable to do much with his right arm. 

See an "after" picture of this young man at our Launch Party for children's surgery on September 11th in Washington DC, and other "before" and "after" pictures of brave young children. This event is FREE.