What makes a hippo smile

As an organization dedicated to offering a range of clinical training opportunities and resources supporting surgery, anesthesia, nursing, speech therapy, and other forms of comprehensive cleft care to medical teams around the world, Smile Train intimately understands the power stable financial support and working capital have to strengthen both health systems and health workers. Hippo Lending does, too. With a subtle nod to the Hippocratic Oath, Hippo Lending represents the convergence of medicine and finance — and a commitment to service and treating their customers as people, not just a loan.

With greater than 25 years in the world of finance and lending, the Hippo Lending team has created a simplified application and lending process to remove obstacles to practice success by creating reliable cash flow to financing specialty equipment and manage debt.

About Smile Train Smile Train empowers local medical professionals with training, funding, and resources to provide free cleft surgery and comprehensive cleft care to children globally. We advance a sustainable solution and scalable global health model for cleft treatment, drastically improving children's lives, including their ability to eat, breathe, speak, and ultimately thrive.

To learn more about how Smile Train's sustainable approach means donations have both an immediate and long-term impact, please visit smiletrain. About Hippo Lending Hippo Lending builds loans specifically for healthcare providers with a streamlined application process - and simple, flexible financing terms — to finance freedom to manage debt and grow business. The hippopotamus is one of Africa's most iconic creatures and one of Earth's most enduring animals, with ancestors dating back over , years.

There's more to these 'river horses' than meets the eye and we invite you to get to know the hippopotamus on our blog! In ancient Egypt, hippos were frequently seen along the Nile River. This proximity led to the Egyptians to revere the hippo in their culture.

When the ancient Greeks visited Egypt they named the creature 'hippopotamus' because 'hippo' means horse and 'potamus' means river. A hippo pod. Hippos live in extended family groupings called pods. These pods include a bull, the dominant male who acts as the head of the pod, several female hippos and their young.

The pod also includes some related male hippos, which the bull hippo merely tolerates. Although hippo species have existed on Earth since before the stone age, , years ago, only two species of hippo remain today. They are the common hippo, the large herbivorous, mammals found across Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, and the pygmy hippo, a smaller mammal native to the rainforests of West Africa.

An adult male hippo weighs an average of 3, pounds and can be up to 17 feet in length.