Family shares benefit of bear hugs.

Byline: Eric Florip The Register-Guard

Sometimes, all a family needs is a good teddy bear - especially when that bear symbolizes the family's own difficult experience.

Julia and David Ozab know this all too well, after they waited more than three hours in a hospital waiting room while their then-3-month-old daughter Anna underwent surgery to correct an incomplete cleft lip in 2006.

During that time, Julia Ozab clutched a stuffed bear with stitches sewn on its upper lip.

"It was so little, but it was something to hang on to - something to think about besides the fact that your child's in surgery," Julia Ozab said.

Now the Ozabs are trying to provide that comfort for other families, organizing a fundraiser to purchase at least 84 more "cleft bears" that will be donated to area hospitals. The unique stuffed animals are distributed through the Cleft Palate Association, a nonprofit organization that launched its "Bears for the Kids" program through a collaboration with teddy bear manufacturer Gund in 2001.

When they're finished raising money in late August, Julia and David will buy bears to donate to Sacred Heart Medical Center, McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center and Doernbecher Children's Hospital in Portland, where Anna, now 18 months old, had her surgery.

"The idea is to help other people," Julia Ozab said. "This is something little we can do. We've wanted to do it since we sat in the waiting room that day."

Cleft lip or cleft palate is a birth defect in which the two sides of a child's upper jaw are separated. Most cases require surgery within a year of the child's birth. The condition affects about one out of every 600 newborns, according to the Cleft Palate Association.

Cleft lip and palate collectively make up the most common birth defect in the United States, said Nancy Smythe, executive director of the Cleft Palate Association. But despite the condition's frequency, most parents aren't fully aware of its existence, David Ozab said.

"You don't think about it until it happens to you," he said.

In just over six years, the North Carolina-based organization has sold more than 7,000 cleft bears to families affected by the birth defect, Smythe said. She said a number of community groups have put together fundraisers to purchase and donate the cleft bears, as the Ozabs are doing in Eugene and Springfield.

`We really appreciate it when communities take on the `Bears for the Kids' as a project that allows them to get out to more kids who need them,' Smythe said. "It's really a wonderful program."

For the Ozabs, the effort already has begun. The two already have started to spread the word with fliers and word-of-mouth advertising, and will hold their main fundraiser Aug. 24-25 with a rummage sale at The Episcopal Church of St. John the Divine in Springfield, where they attend. The church will accept donations on the couple's behalf in the mean time, they said.

Julia and David also traveled to dozens of other Eugene-Springfield churches earlier this week to post fliers, hoping to raise $840, enough for 84 bears.

"I'm hoping, given the response that we've had so far, that we'll hit our 84 and then some," Julia Ozab said.

David Ozab said the family has received plenty of encouragement from other families affected by cleft palate.

But Anna's recovery isn't quite over. She'll have one more surgery at age six or seven when her permanent teeth start coming in, and Julia Ozab said the cleft bear will likely come in handy again - for them and for Anna.

"It turned out to be as much of a comfort for us during her first surgery as it will be for her when she goes into the next step," she said.

WHERE TO DONATE

The Episcopal Church of St. John the Divine: P.O. Box 1537, Springfield, OR 97477