Three Vietnamese doctors - beneficiaries of an operating microscope donated by the Church to the Hanoi Hospital in Vietnam - visited Church headquarters June 13-16 following a training seminar in Virginia.

The doctors met with Elder Marlin K. Jensen of the Seventy, Utah North Area president; Elder Malcolm S. Jeppsen of the Seventy, a counselor in the Utah North Area presidency; and Bishop Glenn L. Pace, second counselor in the Presiding Bishopric, during their visit to Salt Lake City.Dr. Nguyen Thi Minh, Dr. Tran Van Truong and Dr. Nguyen Viet Son stopped in Utah after completing a craniofacial course in Norfolk, Va., sponsored by Operation Smile International, a non-profit organization that sends medical teams to developing countries to perform free corrective surgery on disfigured youth and children.

The Church, through the presidency of the Asia Area, helped arrange the doctors' visit to Virginia and Utah.

Training in Virginia was aimed at improving the doctors' skills while using the microscope, which was donated by the Church last November. With the microscope, surgeons are able to perform microsurgery, a procedure that allows them to reconstruct body parts utilizing other tissues from the patient. Working under a microscope, surgeons sew small arteries and veins of the grafted tissue to the new site to keep the tissue alive. (See Church News, Jan. 11, 1992.)

Several members of Operation Smile are LDS doctors, including Dr. Craig Merrell, president of the Chesapeake Virginia Stake, and Dr. Daniel S. Sellers, an LDS physician from Salt Lake City who served a mission in Hong Kong. They spent a week in Vietnam training doctors in the use of the microscope after the Church donated the equipment last year.

The Vietnamese doctors stayed with Dr. Sellers during their recent visit in Salt Lake City. While in Utah they toured Temple Square, Welfare Square, BYU and visited nearby canyons.

They also visited LDS Hospital to see how hospitals function in Salt Lake City and to get ideas for improving medical facilities in Vietnam. They toured the hospital's emergency room and operating rooms, watched a craniofacial procedure and an open heart surgery and viewed microscopes used at the hospital.

"It was a delightful visit," Dr. Sellers remarked. "It was an educational experience for them to see some of the newer techniques available in facial reconstruction. It was also a good cultural exchange for them. I think they were quite favorably impressed with the Church and were able to see things while here that they had no idea about. Hopefully this will help open some doors in that part of the world.

"The microscope given to them in November is used almost daily," he continued. "It has been a tremendous benefit to their hospital and has allowed them to do things that they were not able to do before. They were appreciative of the gift."