Last month Winston Fiore breezed through Tampa in his motorcycle, making speeches at several different Rotary clubs about his mission: helping kids in South Asia with cleft palates.
It was part of an extremely grass roots national tour that began the first week of July: raising money and consciousness about the issue, which will conclude in the U.S. later this month, but then go into a completely different realm - a 5,000 mile solo hike through Southeast Asia that will last a year.
"Cleft is one of those short things that hits hard in developing countries....a couple of hours of a surgeon's time can make a huge difference, and so I decided to raise money for this cause," he told CL when he visited Tampa in early August.
Fiore, a 26-year-old Indiana native, first conceived of the idea of what he calls the Smile Trek back in 2007 when he spent time in Senegal, and decided then and there that he wanted to do two things: dedicate a year of his life to traveling through a part of the world that he hadn't been to; and also doing something positive about some of the abject poverty he observed while in Africa.
