Zhang Zhengyun is 14 years old and her greatest wish is that she could smile. The young girl was born with a cleft lip and palate, a birth defect that left her mouth resembling a black hole beneath her nose. Now as she finally lay on the operation table to get her long-awaited surgery, she dreamt of a life with a promising future and looked forward to that first smile.

"Her life had been miserable. She dared not smile because she thought it made her look more ugly," said Zhang's mother Li Guoping. Because of her looks she was shunned by other children and her deformed mouth was often a cause of curiosity, stared at by strangers in the way people do when they encounter someone different from themselves. It was devastating for the young girl, who was always covering her mouth with her hands. "She suffered from self-disappointment. And she had never communicated with other people since I was the only person able to understood her speech," said Li.

The handicap, bringing about enormous humiliation and psychological pain to the girl, had made a normal schooling impossible. She repeatedly dropped out of school over the years and had only mastered the courses of grade two. Fixing her lip and managing a smile was all she lived for.

Helping hand

Zhang's family lives in the rural areas of southwestern Province of Sichuan. Her father is a roving manual laborer and her mother takes care of the family farm. For a family struggling to make ends meet, the 9,000 yuan cost of cleft lip and palate surgery was way out of reach. Despite this, the parents took their girl to a hospital several years ago, where she was refused admittance due to the complicated nature of the surgery involved. The girl wept for a whole week after coming back from the hospital.

It was then that fate stepped in.

One day in October 2006, Li Li, manager of a tourism agency in Panzhihua City of Sichuan Province, happened to see Zhang in a corner of an open market. "I saw this girl with a cleft lip standing in the corner alone, watching the hustle and bustle with hopeful eyes, which left a deep impression on me." After returning to Panzhihua, Li Li, still haunted by the girl's eyes, was thrilled to read in a newspaper report that the Smile Train program had been recently expanded to Panzhihua and free surgery was available to families too poor to afford it. Li immediately made arrangements with a local partnership hospital and then rushed back to the market to find the girl.

As the world's leading charitable organization to offer free cleft related surgery for children from poor families, the Smile Train started its cooperation with China's leading charity China Charity Foundation shortly after the former's inception in 1999. Two parties signed an agreement that the American charity donates money for surgeries and the Chinese organization will be in charge of the logistics. The program has now developed into a national project. The selected partner hospitals have expanded from four in four provinces to over 150 in over 30 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions. The age range for recipients has been extended to 40 years and to date the program has provided free cleft surgery to some 101,000 people.

Zhang's operation, which lasted for a little over three hours, was a success, and predictably the girl hasn't stopped smiling.

"Without the kindhearted people and the Smile Train, I don't know when my daughter's cleft lip would have be fixed," said her grateful mother with tears in eyes.

The first Chinese "passenger" aboard the Smile Train was 17-year-old Wang Li. Her parents are farmers of Jiangsu Province. The father, who earns less than 200 yuan a month as a laborer, had thought the family could never afford the surgery his daughter needed.

After the surgery, Wang Li is now a grade four student at a local primary school. "My dream is to become a surgeon after growing up and offer free treatment to patients suffering from cleft deformities like myself," said the lucky girl.