Make It Matter: Rays of Hope

A surgeon repairs faces, an artist leaves smiles around town, and a victim gives others a voice.

When plastic surgeon Geoff Williams saves a face, he also saves a life. Training with Taiwanese mentors on a medical mission in Vietnam, he was astounded by the crowd that greeted them in one village: 200 mothers waiting with their children, all with cleft lips or palates. The women mobbed him, pleading for help, as he entered the local hospital. "It was as if they were in a sinking ship," Williams recalls, "and we were a lifeboat passing by." The surgeons could operate on only 25 to 30 children during their three-day stay. The rest had to be turned away. "It was devastating," Williams says quietly. When his plane left Vietnam, he vowed to go back.

Williams never planned to become a globe-trotting volunteer surgeon. "I thought I'd help these children for a couple of years and get it out of my system." But that was five years ago. Williams, 53, now works full-time correcting facial deformities in 12 countries, including Mexico, Tanzania, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and Taiwan. He has performed almost 1,000 operations, most of them since he started his International Children's Surgical Foundation—and he has no plans to stop.

His work is literally life-changing. Peruvian-born Danit Olivera, for instance, was diagnosed as an infant with facial fibrolipomatosis, a rare deformity. Danit underwent painful treatment that was ultimately ineffective. Depressed by the stares and insults, she stopped attending school and holed up at home, convinced, she now says, that she'd never awake from "a nightmare that had lasted my entire life." Williams told the 19-year-old he could help. Now 20, Danit is thrilled to face the world.

"I am a different person," she says. "I am happy."

Williams could be earning more than $1 million a year doing tummy tucks, face-lifts, and breast enlargements in the United States. A friend told him he was "throwing away my career, that I can't change the world."

But he's never been motivated by money. When he earned $200,000 a year as a professor at a teaching hospital in Galveston, Texas, Williams lived in an apartment that cost $250 a month. He squirreled away most of his paycheck and now lives off his savings. Because he travels most of the time and is single, he stays with his parents in Boise, Idaho, between missions (and insists on paying them $10 a day). "I'm just not a guy who needs a new wardrobe every year," he explains.

Williams is multiplying his impact by teaching other doctors the nuances of his skill. "The Vietnamese mothers drilled something into me: that their children really suffer. Their suffering can be alleviated—but not just by me. My real legacy is that I help to empower doctors and they empower other doctors, so this work has mushroomed into something larger than what any one person can do alone."

• • Inspiring Stories
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