Oak Forest HS Students Learn a Valuable Lesson from Literature

Oak Forest High School AP Literature and Composition students know how to make kids smile.

When OFHS AP Literature and Composition teacher Katie Cotrano asked them if they’d be interested in raising money for Operation Smile, an organization that repairs children’s cleft lips and cleft palates, they did not hesitate to help.

This year, the class has been reading Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, the students fell in love with the selfless, loyal Hassan, a character “marked for greatness” by his cleft lip. Hassan is rejected, and ultimately abandoned, by his own mother, who refuses to even hold him after he’s born, a harsh reality for some children around the world. After Mrs. Cotrano introduced the students to the not-for-profit organization Operation Smile, the fundraising began. The classes set a lofty goal of $240, the average cost of a life-changing surgery.

Operation Smile was founded in 1982 by a plastic surgeon, Dr. William P. Magee, Jr. and his wife Kathy, a nurse and social worker. After their heart-wrenching visit to the Philippines, the Magees began a "grassroots fundraising” operation, soliciting donations, supplies, and medical volunteers to provide free surgeries to children born with the condition. Today, Operation Smile is a worldwide organization that provides thousands of children access to safe surgery for cleft lips and cleft palates.

The AP Literature and Composition Bengals raised $500 for Operation Smile, enough to sponsor two children’s surgeries. Reading about Hassan in The Kite Runner opened students’ big hearts to helping others like him. These students will never meet the doctors who perform these surgeries nor the children, Diagam from Ethiopia and Chutima from Thailand, whose lives they’ve changed. Nonetheless, lives have been changed.

Great authors and medical doctors realize they have the power to positively impact others' lives, and they do something about it. Our Bengals have done the same. And that’s something to smile about.