Ecuador has the world's highest rate of microtia -- the absence of one or both ears. A team of 30 doctors, a third of them from Boston, and funded by the HUGS foundation, worked on 76 new ears, fashioned from the patients' own cartilage, tissue, and skin. For the patients, the surgery is free.

Pictured: Michelle Tandazo Jimenez, 11, with her mother before the third stage surgery (with graft).