Cindy McCain's Soft Spot: Operation Smile

June 21, 2008 — -- While Americans are attending church this Sunday, Cindy McCain — the woman who could one day be first lady — will be walking around a garbage dump, far removed from her comfortable life in Phoenix.

This is the other side of Cindy McCain — not the model-perfect spouse of the candidate who wears pearls and designer clothes. On this side of the world, she wears old hiking boots, puts her hair up in a ponytail and wants to "get to work."

It's not a newly invented Cindy McCain either. She's been volunteering on various missions for years. You just might not have heard much about it.

A new ABC News-Washington Post poll released this week found more than one-third of Americans had no opinion of Cindy McCain. Asked if she is "mysterious," McCain smiled.

"I don't think I am very mysterious," she said. "I have led my life differently. ... I am not the candidate, I have never been front and center. I do the things I enjoy, and I do the things that are important to me. And do them in a way that I like to do them."

On Thursday, that meant a visit to a hospital in the coastal Vietnamese city of Nha Trang with the organization Operation Smile.

When McCain arrived, parents were already lining up to have their young children screened, hoping they might qualify for the organization's promise of free facial surgery to fix cleft palates, cleft lips or severe facial deformities. In fact, they have given out more than 115,000 surgeries in 26 countries.

In an interview with ABC News, McCain said a simple $286 surgery can change a child's life forever.

"A child that would probably be kept in a closet or kept in the back part of the house and never really be seen by family friends or neighbors ... can not only come out but can have a productive, fulfilling life," she said.

McCain stopped to talk to Mai Thi Kim Huong, a mother holding a 9-month-old boy with a severe cleft lip. Mai had no idea who the blonde foreigner was, just that she might help her family.