Darragh Peter Murphy travelled to Vietnam with the support of the Fund to report on the OpSmile project. More than forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, huge areas of the country still remain affected by Agent Orange, the chemical sprayed across swathes of the country by the United States military in the 1970s as an act of herbicidal warfare.
This project examined the work of OpSmile, which brings western medics – among them Irish medics – to carry out corrective facial surgery on those affected by the chemical. Darragh also looked at how Vietnamese civil society organisations and other non-governmental organisations, are helping to alleviate the suffering.
His article ‘Giving the babies of Vietnam their smiles back’ was published in The Irish Times in May 2017.
