Cindy McCain, wife of the U.S. Republican Party's presumptive presidential nominee John McCain, on Thursday visited Vietnam with a charity that provides surgery to children with facial deformities.
She visited Khanh Hoa general hospital in the southern city of Nha Trang, where about 350 children are being examined for medical treatment, many of them needing surgery for cleft lips or cleft palates.
Cindy McCain's charitable work and interest in helping children with cleft lips or cleft palates dates back more than a decade. She and Senator John McCain adopted a child born with a cleft palate from Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh in 1993.
Their daughter, Bridget, now 16, was successfully treated in the United States.
At the hospital she met again with Le Thi Phuoc, 11, whom she helped to provide cleft lip surgery in the United States.
"Her cousin was working in a restaurant that John and I like to go," she told reporters at the hospital. "He came to me with a picture and said...can you help me?"
Cindy McCain has been on the Board of Directors of Operation Smile since April 2005.
Her other medical missions with the organisation have been to Tangier, Morocco in 2001, Danang, Vietnam in 2002, Deesa, India in 2003 and Bao Loc, Vietnam last year.
The organisation's volunteers have since 1982 treated more than 115,000 children around the world suffering with facial deformities, the group said.
"It's really a rare occasion to have her visit here and it is also an honour to our hospital," said the hospital's director Dr Nguyen Manh Tien. "This visit would bring more good things and promote friendship between Vietnam and the United States of America."
Sen. McCain, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party in the November 2008 presidential election, was a prisoner during the Vietnam War for 5- years from 1967.
He and other veterans such as Democratic Senator John Kerry are also remembered by Vietnamese as being instrumental in helping the U.S. government establish diplomatic relations in 1995 with their former enemies, the communist government in Hanoi, 20 years after the end of the war.
(Reporting by Nguyen Van Vinh; Editing by Grant McCool and Sanjeev Miglani
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