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The Children of Sumatra was set up with the aim of helping children suffering from cleft lip and palate living on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Many families there are too poor to pay for a simple operation that can transform their child’s future.
In Europe and America we are almost unaware of this condition because the correction of cleft lip and palate is a routine operation carried out in the first year of a child’s life. If left untreated it can have a disastrous effect on a child, making both education and social acceptance very difficult.

THE EXCEPTIONAL personal contribution of a Coolham woman has been recognised by Billingshurst Rotary Club.
Katie Pavett, 37, has been honoured with a Paul Harris Fellowship Award for her work on the island of Sumatra where she set up a charity to help children with facial deformities caused by cleft lip and palate.
The award is the highest honour that Rotary can bestow upon a person and previous recipients include Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Prince Philip.
It is the first time that Billingshurst Rotary Club has presented it to a non-Rotarian. Along with the award of [pounds sterling]1,000 donation was made to her charity - The Children of Sumatra.

Celebrating 100 Smiles
In October 2007 theChildren of Sumatracelebrated the successfull operation of its 100th child! We have come a long way since the first operation in 2002. 51 out of the 100 children we have helped so far were operated on in 2007.
Give the gift of a smile today. Join our 100 Smiles for Christmas Appeal <100smiles.html>, launched last Christmas, to help raise £12,000 for the next 100 smiles by Christmas 2008. So far we have raised a wonderful £2640.00, making 22 smiles possible. It is a great start but we need your help to go further and be able to offer operations to all the children on our growing waiting list..

News update from Sumatra...April 2008

2007 was a very busy year for the Children of Sumatra. We managed to operate on over 50 children suffering from cleft lip and palate taking our total to well over 100. This year we have already started operating and our waiting list already has over 50 children.
We were very lucky to receive a donation of a small mini bus from Oxfam earlier this year. This allows us to reach children from more isolated villages around Aceh and Sumatra as well as enabling us to visit the operated children more frequently to fulfill their essential aftercare needs.
This April we will start operating on children every month and will carry on through to September when a team of Dutch doctors come over to Indonesia to help with some of the more difficult cases. Our waiting list is growing every day - the more villages we reach the more children we find in need.
1 in 300 children are born with this disability in Sumatra so The Children of Sumatra are in great need of funding to be able to carry on helping the huge amount of children that are born with this condition every year. It is so important to get these children to qualified surgeons who can give them good operations. Many children have operations that have been carried out by unskilled doctors and the results can be awful.
I would like to thank everyone for all their support and apologies for not being in touch as often as I would like.
Katie Pavett, Children of Sumatra