Cari Long: A Journey Full Circle
by Ann K. Monteith
“There are no ordinary moments.” How many times had Cari Long heard Dr. William Magee, founder of Operation Smile, say this? Over the years, as their paths have crossed in different stages of her life, Cari had no way of knowing that someday a remarkable concordance of events would bring Dr. Magee’s words to life in a most personal way, as she prepared to photograph a timid new mother and her newborn baby in a clinic in Paraguay.
“There are no ordinary moments.” For Dr. Magee, who together with his wife, Kathy, founded Operation Smile in 1982, these five words have become the refrain through which he explains how a one-time medical mission to provide cleft lip and cleft palette surgeries to needy children in the Philippines ultimately blossomed into the world’s largest volunteer-based medical charity providing free facial surgeries, working in more than 60 countries.
To Dr. Magee, these words represented the phenomenon by which Operation Smile grew organically . . . as one person at a time would be moved by seeing children’s lives changed so profoundly through the gift of healing: Inspired by the power of these moments, they would pass on this vision to others, who themselves would want to help expand the organization’s reach.
Cari Connects With Operation Smile
Like the thousands of children Operation Smile has helped around the world, Cari was born with a cleft. But unlike so many children in the developing world, she received reconstructive surgery several months after birth as a matter of course. The tiny scar that remains is barely a footnote in Cari’s personal history: “It was never an issue in my growing up, she says.”
Following her graduation from North Carolina State University with a B.S. degree in biology, Cari pursued her M.S. degree in human genetics at the University of South Carolina. She then accepted a position as a genetics counselor at Norfolk Virginia’s Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters, where Dr. Magee maintained a Craniofacial Clinic. That is where they first crossed paths. “I got to know Dr. Magee through working with his patients at his clinic for several years,” she explained. By then she had started a family with her husband, Jason, that today includes son Keaton, age 17, and daughters Reece, 15, and Sasha, 10.
Several years later, when Jason’s pharmaceuticals job relocated the family to Northern Virginia, Cari worked in breast cancer genetics until Reece was born. “I didn’t want to have two kids in daycare,” she said “so I decided to stay home with them and take a few photography classes at a local community college.” Cari credits her interest in both biology and photography to her father, a biology teacher and a hobbyist in photography. “I learned a lot about photography from my dad, she said, “as I loved printing in his dark room with him.”
While living in Virginia, Cari reconnected with Dr. Magee, when she and Jason journeyed to Norfolk so that he could perform surgery on two-year-old Reece, who had a benign tumor under her eye that would not stop bleeding. When Jason’s job responsibilities took the family to North Carolina in 2002, the possibility that Cari would once again cross paths with Dr. Magee might have been unlikely, had it not been for her decision to open a photography business. Neither Cari nor Dr. Magee could have guessed that ten years later, both would reach for those five magic words to describe a very special encounter that would take place during an Operation Smile mission to Asunción, Paraguay. Continue reading →
