Ney is a twelve-year-old Cambodian boy who was born with an encephelocele a condition where his brain protruded, through a defect in the bones of his face, into his cheek. Not only did he run the risk of a life threatening brain injury and infection, but Ney was regularly bullied and beaten at school. Since his surgery he has now returned to school where he is no longer abused. (Photo: facingtheworld.net)November 16 2006
DAVID BELCHER
The Herald (UK)
My New face; Channel 4, 9PM
In their everyday working lives in London, plastic surgeons Martin Kelly and Norman Waterhouse attend to wealthy stars intent on keeping the years at bay with a tautening of the facial wrinkles here and a tightening of the saggier bits there. As palpably decent coves, the duo are also aware that children in developing countries born with facial disfigurements usually have no such choice. They're doomed to a life of suffering and torment, imprisoned by the stigma of physical deformity.
It's a stigma that can be life-threatening too. One of the subjects of last night's documentary My New Face, 12-year-old Ney from Cambodia, was brutally stoned by his playmates for the crime of looking different. For children like him, facial amendment isn't a matter of vanity. It's a necessity.
Four years ago, Kelly and Waterhouse's caring impulses led them to join a team flying to Kabul in Afghanistan, a place as desperately poor as it is war-torn, to perform cranial-facial surgery. As is the case with many such humanitarian surgery schemes, the team operated on as many children as it could in the short time it had. However, as Martin Kelly stated: "There's always one kid at the back of the queue that has problems too severe to treat in makeshift conditions."
That led the pair to set up a charity, Facing the World, which offers to bring such children to London for surgery to alleviate their suffering from facial disfigurement. Their initiative also led to last night's moving - as well as bloodily gruelling, it must be said - feature-length film, which followed the two-year progress of the mission the surgeons set themselves: to help as many disfigured children as possible.
They followed five cases and took us from Indonesia to Cambodia via the Philippines and Ethiopia. It showed scenes of pioneering surgery - and for once the term "cutting-edge" didn't quite suffice. This was bleeding-edge stuff: outsized tumours being removed; one child having his entire facial skin peeled back like a mask, all the better to allow a section of skull to be cut out.
While choosing to risk making its audience feel queasy, My New Face also chose not to make them feel weepy. With brave realism, the programme avoided the cheap and easy sentimental route. Naturally, the documentary leavened its grisly footage of operations with happy scenes of anticipation, transformation and eventual domestic reunion - but it didn't seek to pretend that its subjects were going to attain instant film-star good looks.
Nor did it flinch from showing the tough choices so many doctors find themselves having to make. In particular, there was the severely brain-damaged two-year-old in Indonesia whose hellish sight-threatening facial tumour was deemed untreatable by Facing the World's medics. Their reasoning was logically correct, if brutal: it would only improve the life of the patient's parents, not the life of the uncomprehending patient.
The programme also left unresolved the case of the poor boy from Ethiopia born with a deformity every bit as awful as a facial one. In a nasty genetic joke, he'd been born with an incomplete urinary system: minus one exterior bit and with his interior workings exposed.
My New Face began by showing us its one full-time administrator. It concluded by revealing that the charity has only been able to treat 15 children so far. So, with that in mind, I'll end by making an appeal to everyone who, like me, regularly glares at themself in the mirror and exclaims: "I've got a face like a half-chewed caramel." You shouldn't just thank your lucky stars; you should log on to facingtheworld.net right now and make an instant donation online or discover how to send them a cheque.
It's a stigma that can be life-threatening too. One of the subjects of last night's documentary My New Face, 12-year-old Ney from Cambodia, was brutally stoned by his playmates for the crime of looking different. For children like him, facial amendment isn't a matter of vanity. It's a necessity.
Four years ago, Kelly and Waterhouse's caring impulses led them to join a team flying to Kabul in Afghanistan, a place as desperately poor as it is war-torn, to perform cranial-facial surgery. As is the case with many such humanitarian surgery schemes, the team operated on as many children as it could in the short time it had. However, as Martin Kelly stated: "There's always one kid at the back of the queue that has problems too severe to treat in makeshift conditions."
That led the pair to set up a charity, Facing the World, which offers to bring such children to London for surgery to alleviate their suffering from facial disfigurement. Their initiative also led to last night's moving - as well as bloodily gruelling, it must be said - feature-length film, which followed the two-year progress of the mission the surgeons set themselves: to help as many disfigured children as possible.
They followed five cases and took us from Indonesia to Cambodia via the Philippines and Ethiopia. It showed scenes of pioneering surgery - and for once the term "cutting-edge" didn't quite suffice. This was bleeding-edge stuff: outsized tumours being removed; one child having his entire facial skin peeled back like a mask, all the better to allow a section of skull to be cut out.
While choosing to risk making its audience feel queasy, My New Face also chose not to make them feel weepy. With brave realism, the programme avoided the cheap and easy sentimental route. Naturally, the documentary leavened its grisly footage of operations with happy scenes of anticipation, transformation and eventual domestic reunion - but it didn't seek to pretend that its subjects were going to attain instant film-star good looks.
Nor did it flinch from showing the tough choices so many doctors find themselves having to make. In particular, there was the severely brain-damaged two-year-old in Indonesia whose hellish sight-threatening facial tumour was deemed untreatable by Facing the World's medics. Their reasoning was logically correct, if brutal: it would only improve the life of the patient's parents, not the life of the uncomprehending patient.
The programme also left unresolved the case of the poor boy from Ethiopia born with a deformity every bit as awful as a facial one. In a nasty genetic joke, he'd been born with an incomplete urinary system: minus one exterior bit and with his interior workings exposed.
My New Face began by showing us its one full-time administrator. It concluded by revealing that the charity has only been able to treat 15 children so far. So, with that in mind, I'll end by making an appeal to everyone who, like me, regularly glares at themself in the mirror and exclaims: "I've got a face like a half-chewed caramel." You shouldn't just thank your lucky stars; you should log on to facingtheworld.net right now and make an instant donation online or discover how to send them a cheque.
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