HOWLAND Blessing Kenya with smiles

Her daughter went on a similar trip in 2001.
By STEPHEN SIFF
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
HOWLAND -- Years after retiring from a career managing doctors' offices, Janice Kenney will take up the clipboard again this week during a two-week trip to Kenya.
Kenney, 62, leaves Tuesday for Africa with Operation Smile, a not-for-profit volunteer group that fixes cleft palates and other facial deformities for children in developing countries.
Keeping records
For two weeks, she will help keep records for hundreds of patients who travel to visit a clinic in Eldoret, Kenya, where the team of 40 professionals from the United States will stay.
"For the week after I got a phone call that I was going to go I had trouble sleeping," said Kenney, a grandmother of five who spends spare time compiling scrapbooks and volunteering with civic groups. "I was so excited."
She will be following in the footsteps of daughter LeeAnn Damian, a Dayton speech pathologist, who went on a two-week trip with Operation Smile to the same town in 2001.
Expectations
Kenney said she applied to go the same year as her daughter, but -- to her husband's relief -- was not selected.
They called her back this year.
"I know what I'm getting into now because I learned so much from my daughter," said Kenney, who is contributing $450 toward the cost of her trip.
She said she expects to be moved by the depth of poverty and by the parents who travel hundreds of miles to learn if there is a chance their child might be helped.
She expects to work long days during the two-week operation, then fly back, leaving behind most of her clothes and other items as donations.
"This is not a vacation," she said.
Since its first mission to Kenya in 1987, Norfolk, Va.-based Operation Smile has surgically treated 7,998 children for facial deformities.