Last Thursday, the Bucknell community was lucky enough to welcome Dr. William P. Magee Jr. to campus. Dr. Magee is the CEO and founder of Operation Smile, an international medical charity that operates on children born with cleft lips, cleft palates, and other facial deformities. Since 1982, Operation Smile has provided 220,000 free surgeries in over 60 countries. Dr. Magee built the organization from the ground up after a medical trip to the Philippines. On his first trip, he realized that the volunteers had to turn away 240 children who were in desperate need of surgery. While they were able to perform surgery on 60 children, the vast majority of children who showed up to the clinic were left untreated. In one particular instance, the mother of one untreated child brought Dr. Magee a gift. She brought him a stalk of bananas. She said that she knew it wasn’t much, but it was all she had. When he asked her why she was giving him a gift, she said that the gift was for trying to help her daughter even though she was turned away. The mother said that hopefully next year her daughter would be chosen. However, Dr. Magee knew that the volunteers were not planning a trip for next year. In that moment, Operation Smile was born.
Dr. Magee said that Operation Smile was born out of emotion, rather than reason. He said, “reason leads to conclusions, but emotion leads to actions”. No amount of knowledge can change the world. Knowledge alone will never be enough. Rather, it is passion and emotion that create change. Dr. Magee was emotionally moved by the fact that he had to turn patients away and this is what led him to take tremendous action.
One of the main themes of his speech was using your gifts to change the world. In another trip, Dr. Magee saw a patient with a severe cleft palate that caused the patient to be ostracized by his village. In order to hide his deformity, the patient always wore a bandana and a baseball cap. When he removed the bandana, the sight was shocking, even to Dr. Magee. Malnutrition and infection had amplified the severity of the cleft lip. When he came to Dr. Magee, his spirit was broken. He had been living his life as an outcast and he had received very little compassion from those in his village. His cleft lip kept him from enjoying a meaningful life. Dr. Magee told the patient, “I can fix your cleft lip, but you have to be the one to change your outlook on life”. Rather than seeing his cleft lip as a curse, Dr. Magee told him to see it as his gift and his blessing. The patient knows what it feels like to be an outcast, so he has the ability to be compassionate towards others who are ostracized. He has the ability to show empathy and compassion for others. He can use that compassion to make the world a better place. Dr. Magee told the audience to be aware of our gifts and to always use our gifts to help others.