New smiles, changed lives Stetson alumni climb to great heights – three Colorado peaks in one day – all in the name of help, hope and reconstructing cleft palates. BY CORY LANCASTER
Nestor de Armas has seen children around the world with cleft lips and palates, congenital deformities that cause their families to hide them indoors and never send them to school. Twenty years ago, de Armas started helping a charity that provided free reconstructive surgery and long-term medical care for children with cleft lips and palates in Mexico. Since then, Florida Hospital Sharing Smiles (formerly SHARES International) has expanded throughout Latin America, where children are three times more likely to be born with cleft lips and palates than in the United States, according to the charity’s website. “I think what captured me was the dramatic impact this had on kids’ lives,” said de Armas ’73 (accounting), a Stetson Trustee Emeritus and retired executive from Winter Park. “What happens when you give a child a new face, you give them hope. Their life changes. They have opportunities they never dreamt they would.” De Armas looks for ways to get others involved with the charity and found a novel approach in August. He and Steve Buchanan, a double-Hatter (business administration ’69 and master’s in education ’74), climbed three 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado in one day, Aug. 11. They were joined by David Collis, president of the Florida Hospital Foundation. The 9-mile hike took 7.5 hours, with each of the men burning 4,900 calories. Their reward: raising $6,500 to provide
Mount Democrat is a high-mountain summit in the Mosquito Range of the Rocky Mountains.
reconstructive surgery and comprehensive medical care for 13 children with cleft lips and palates in Mexico by Christmas. Among the contributors was Stetson. “We felt it would be a good way to get people involved, and I hoped we could raise $1,500 – and we raised four times that,” de Armas noted, adding that the surgery and follow-up medical care cost $500 per child. For de Armas and Buchanan, it was their first time climbing three “fourteeners,” as hikers call mountains of that height, in one day. The men trained for months and wondered if they would be able to climb Mount Democrat (14,155 feet), Mount Cameron (14,238 feet) and Mount Lincoln (14,295 feet). De Armas, 71, was making the climb just months after a cardiologist discovered blockage in a blood vessel and inserted a heart catheter. He underwent the procedure in May after deciding to get checked out while training for the hike. Buchanan, 72, said the climb was “quite an exertion,” even though he hikes regularly, having moved from Lake Mary, Florida, to Colorado five years ago. “Doing a fourteener is always an adventure, just because of the steepness and the altitude,” said Buchanan, who lives near Breckenridge, Colorado. “But we were highly motivated to do it.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cleft lips and palates are birth defects that occur in the first trimester of pregnancy. The lips and roof of the mouth form as body tissue and special cells from each side of the head grow toward the center to form the face. A cleft lip and palate occur when the tissue does not join together completely. The causes are unknown, although a combination of genes and risk factors, such as smoking, diabetes or using certain medications in the first trimester of pregnancy, are believed to play a role. In the United States, babies born with the birth defect