THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 28, 1995 TAG: 9509280366
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 167 lines
How do you measure a father's love?
Is it in the stamina necessary for daylong hikes over mountains and through thick jungle?
Is it in the strength required to ford three rivers while carrying his 11-year-old daughter?
Is it in the courage essential to leave the familiar, and fly 2,000 miles to the United States so his daughter can have the surgery she needs to lead a normal life?
If so, Alijencio Barrera's love for his daughter, Demetria, is great indeed.
He did all that - and more - to see his daughter's cleft lip and palate repaired.
Wednesday in Norfolk, the founder of Operation Smile, Dr. William Magee, successfully completed a three-hour operation to correct the deformity on Demetria's face. It was an operation that will enable the girl to speak clearly for the first time in her life and to finally attend school.
And it was the result of a remarkable struggle by her father.
A 45-year-old Panamanian farmer, Barrera lives with his wife, 2-year-old son, 19-year-old daughter and Demetria in a dirt-floored bamboo hut smaller than most American bedrooms. They live in the farming village of Aguas de Salud, about a four-hour bus ride from the capital of Panama City.
There, he tends a small garden, his family's main sustenance, and works four weeks a year on a sugar-cane plantation, earning the family's annual income of $100.
Barrera is a compact man, with leathery skin blackened from years of working in the Panamanian sun. His hands - hard and large in comparison to the rest of his body, with dirt-encrusted nails - tell the story of his life.
The family has no electricity, running water or telephone. Isolated as he was, Barrera didn't know deformities like his daughter's could be fixed, even though in most Western countries cleft-palate surgery is routinely performed days after birth. So Demetria, an otherwise pretty girl with glossy black hair and liquid black eyes, grew up with a hole in her lip, through which three teeth protruded in a vertical line.
She didn't speak until she was 5, and still rarely talks, embarrassed by the sounds she makes. She's never attended school, because her father feared the other children would tease her.
About a year ago, during a rare visit to a medical clinic in a neighboring village, Barrera learned that his daughter's problem could be fixed. And thus began his quest.
The medical staff told him to take her to the hospital in Santiago, the capital of the province where the family lives. To get there requires either an all-day walk through the jungle - over the mountains and three rivers - or a two-hour walk to the nearest major road and then a four-hour bus ride.
But the bus ride costs $8 for two - nearly 10 percent of the family's annual income. So last October, Barrera set out with Demetria on foot for the hospital. Five times they made the round-trip journey. Twice they arrived to find the doctor in surgery all day. Once they had forgotten Demetria's birth certificate.
On the fourth visit, the medical staff conducted tests and told them to come back again to see the doctor. They did, only to be sent to Panama City, where Operation Smile, a Norfolk-based charitable medical organization, has an office. This time, at least, the medical staff in Santiago gave them money for the bus ride.
But the surgery didn't happen. The paperwork bogged down the Barreras, and they were told to go back to Santiago. Instead, they just went home.
When Operation Smile surgeons went to Panama in early 1995, representatives tried desperately to get a message to the Barreras, who had no phone or radio. Operation Smile broadcast a plea for help over the country's radio station, hoping that someone who knew the family would find them.
By the time Barrera received the message and made the arduous journey back to the hospital with his daughter, it was too late. The surgical team was packing up to go.
But there was to be one more chance.
Last month, Luis Quinzada, a coordinator with Operation Smile's Panama office, received a call from the producers of the CBS-TV program ``Touched By An Angel.'' The weekly drama features ``angels'' helping people with their problems. The executive producer had written a segment about Operation Smile, and Magee suggested using children with real facial deformities in the filming. There were three in Panama, he remembered, whom his team had missed on its last visit. If the show could get them to the United States, he promised, they would have their corrective surgery here.
Demetria was one.
A call went out over the radio again for someone to contact Demetria's family. They had three weeks to get to Salt Lake City for filming. Operation Smile, desperate to find the girl, readied a helicopter to fly into the jungle. Then a call came from the Santiago hospital - father and daughter were there.
Demetria and her father had borrowed the $8 necessary to make the bus trip to Santiago, where they thought she would undergo the surgery. Instead, the doctor put them on a bus to Panama City. They arrived on a Thursday morning, three days before they were to leave for Salt Lake City and the ``Angel'' show.
They arrived barefoot - and Quinzada bought them their first pairs of shoes.
They also arrived paperless, and the next 24 hours were a whirl of arranging passports and visas. Quinzada knew the American Embassy stopped issuing visas at 10 a.m. on Fridays, so he begged officials there to extend their deadline for this special case. They agreed to stay open until 4 p.m., but it wasn't until 4:30 that he had the finished passports in hand for the visas.
``They weren't very happy,'' he said Wednesday, waiting with the Barreras for Demetria's surgery. But the American officials issued the visas.
Throughout the preparations, Barrera still didn't understand that he and Demetria would be staying in the United States for two weeks. It hit him while he was in line at the airport.
``I don't want to go,'' he said, terrified of leaving all he knew for a strange country with a language he couldn't speak.
Quinzada cajoled and soothed him into making the trip. It is a gift for your daughter, he said. Still fearful, but trusting Quinzada, Barrera boarded the plane with Demetria.
Children scheduled for surgery at Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters wait in a toy-filled room on the hospital's third floor. There, dozens of playthings - from Nintendo and videos to puzzles and giant playhouses - work to distract the young patients from their fears.
Wednesday morning, in a small alcove off the main room - about the size of her home in Panama - Demetria waited, her dark eyes fearful, constantly seeking reassurance from Quinzada, who had followed the family here as an interpreter. Her father sat stiffly next to her, a straw hat clapped tightly on his head, occasionally wiping his nose and mouth with an orange cloth he stuffed in his back pocket.
Both were scared. Both were homesick. Both just wanted this to be over.
The past week had been a blur of newness. They'd slept in their first hotel room - on top of the bedspread because they didn't know the blankets were there to cover them. Demetria had fallen in love with the radio Quinzada had bought her, spending hours listening to country music.
Barrera was awed by the elephants at the Virginia Zoo and had bought a plastic gray elephant to take home as a souvenir.
Demetria had her own souvenirs. Mickey Mouse and Pocahontas dolls, a baseball bat (her favorite). But they were mostly untouched, as were the toys in the hospital waiting room.
``She doesn't know how to play,'' Quinzada explained. At home, Demetria's day is filled with chores. Play, relaxation - these were nearly unknown to her.
And so she sat, waiting for the nurse to take her hand and walk her into the operating room, while in front of her a Nintendo game scrolled across the television screen. An American 11-year-old would have been at the joystick. But Demetria just sat. Occasionally giggling as a photographer took her picture. Eyeing Quinzada for translations of the babble of English around her. Shifting uncomfortably on the hard chair.
The surgery took three hours. When it was over, a nauseated and very thirsty Demetria opened her eyes in the recovery room to see her father leaning over her.
The Barreras are not an emotional or demonstrative family. So Alijencio Barrera didn't hug or even kiss his daughter. He just gently wiped a little blood from her mouth with his cloth.
Even with the stitches, the operation's success was obvious. The ugly teeth protruding between her split lip were gone. So was the split lip. Still, when someone offered Demetria a mirror, she refused, shaking her head firmly.
In her mind, the deformity was still there.
But several hours later, speaking from her hospital room, Quinzada pronounced: ``She looks beautiful.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
MOTOYA NAKAMURA
Staff photos
Five times did Alijencio Barrera make a day's walk with Demetria
through jungles, over mountains and across three rivers in Panama -
to get her to surgeons who could fix her cleft lip and palate. In
the end: Norfolk, surgery, a mirror.
KEYWORDS: OPERATION SMILE by CNB