Deformed youth gets 'new life'

Deformed youth gets 'new life'

PERTH (Antara): An Indonesian boy born with a face so deformed he had considered killing himself is to be given the chance of a new life by Australian surgeons.

Sandi Gisisi, 17, from a coconut farming family on the tiny island of Ternate in the Halmahera group north Maluku, is scheduled to be operated on Monday in Perth's Mount Hospital.

The operation will be supervised by Perth plastic surgeon Tim Cooper, who met Gisisi in Ambon last year when he spent two weeks there as a member of an Interplast Australia team which carried out surgery on more than 60 children who turned up for help.

"I realized then that I could not fix him up properly without bringing him back to Perth," Cooper said Friday.

"I had noticed him huddled in a corner of the hospital with his hand over his face."

Gisisi traveled 24 hours by boat to be seen by the visiting doctors.

Perth's Mill Point Rotary Club, a service body committed to helping the underprivileged, and Mount Hospital specialist staff donating their skills free of charge, made Gisisi's visit to the Western Australian capital possible.

Cooper said the youth had an unusual cleft condition -- a hole in his palate and upper jaw. He planned to take skin from his forearm to reconstruct his badly malformed lip and cheek.

Gisisi has been accompanied to Perth by a Franciscan nun, Sister Helena Nanayain, who works among lepers in Ambon.

Sister Helena said Gisisi had told her he would commit suicide if he did not have an operation to improve his appearance.

"He has spent a lifetime hiding what he regards as his 'awful face'," she said.

He had few friends, had never been to school and could not read or write, the nun said.