A million reasons to smile: Canning River’s 20-year partnership with Interplast

pictured: Ngawang with Bhutanese surgeon Dr Sonam and Dr Michael from Adelaide, as her hands are unbandaged after surgery in 2025.

For two decades, the Rotary Club of Canning River has been a driving force behind Interplast’s life-changing surgical and training programs, contributing more than $1 million to transform lives across the Asia-Pacific.

Since Rotary co-founded Interplast in 1983, Rotarians and Rotary clubs across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific have been the life-blood of the organisation.

Since then, Interplast has provided more than 23,000 reconstructive surgeries to patients in developing nations and provided training for thousands of clinicians – an accomplishment of which Interplast and Rotary can be justifiably proud.

One Rotary club in particular stands out for its 20 years of support for Interplast’s life-changing work.

The Rotary Club of Canning River (formerly Kenwick), WA, has contributed more than $1 million to Interplast since it created a regular giving program for local businesses. Designed by club members Steve Weychan and PDG Brian Guest, the program sees businesses donate every month, supplemented by the generosity of several individual donors.

The club has made surgical and training programs possible in countries too numerous to list and directly changed the lives of thousands of patients and their families. Patients who were living with stigma and disability due to untreated cleft lips and palates, severe burns scarring or traumatic injuries have had access to surgery and associated treatment that was previously unavailable to them. Clinicians who have learnt from Interplast’s volunteer surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses and physiotherapists will continue to change lives into the future.

One of Interplast’s current patients is Ngawang, who lives in Bhutan. At age seven, Ngawang was severely burnt on her chest and hands while heating bath water. She was using an electric heating rod to heat the water and inadvertently gripped the rod in her hand as it heated up. Instinctively she grabbed the hot rod with her other hand, and as it continued to burn her hands, she fell to the floor. The rod then badly burnt her upper body before her father could get to her.

Ngawang’s burns were significant. Without access to the emergency and ongoing burns treatment that we take for granted in Australia and New Zealand, the burnt skin formed severe contractures, causing Ngawang great difficulty in her everyday life and forcing her to re-think her plans for study and a career.

Ngawang has had multiple surgeries and her future now looks much brighter, thanks to the generosity and hard work of past and present Rotarians in Canning River. Interplast can’t thank them enough!