Pat Dollard | Young Americans

CNS:

When Sarah told her boss in Iraq that she needed an extended break from work to take her child for heart surgery in Israel, he told her, ‘Maybe they’ll kill you.’ But she said she told him, “Why would they give me a visa and offer to operate on my daughter if they were going to kill me?”

Sarah’s (not her real name) seven-month-old daughter is one of more 45 Iraqi children who have been brought to Israel since 2004 for life-saving heart surgery through the Save A Child’s Heart (SACH) program at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, south of Tel Aviv.

Iraq, like most of the Arab world, has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein paid large sums of money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers as an incentive to blow up Israelis in the first years of the Palestinian uprising, which started in 2000. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was hit by at least 39 Iraqi Scud missiles.

But that does not matter to SACH. Founded in 1996 by the late Dr. Ami Cohen, an American-born pediatric heart surgeon, SACH has saved the lives of some 1,800 children from 29 countries since its inception, said Executive Director Simon Fisher.

The young patients come from countries such as China, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority areas, SACH says. Most of the children are not Jewish.

While the objective is life-saving, Fisher admitted that there is an element of people-to-people peace-making that happens as well.

“Our motto is, ‘A child is a child,’ regardless of where the child comes from, regardless of race, color, religion, nationality — every child deserves the best medical treatment that we can offer that child,” Fisher told Cybercast News Service. The program has a success rate of about 97 percent, he said.

“But indirectly, by the fact that we are located in the Middle East…we all feel this responsibility to make that much of an effort for children who are living in…our neighborhood,” he said.

Around 800 of the children who have received treatment are Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Four Palestinian doctors are now training at the center, said Fisher.

Fisher said one of the most frustrating things is the political climate that makes Palestinian doctors reluctant to be seen working next to Israeli doctors in hospitals in eastern Jerusalem.

Dr. Lior Sasson, 47, performs all 200 heart surgeries each year on the children who come through the SACH program.

“I wouldn’t trade it for anything else,” Sasson said shortly after completing surgery on a four-year-old Iraqi boy. “What we are doing here is really making a difference because the children that we are taking probably would die sooner or later.”

While such surgeries might be available elsewhere in the Middle East or Africa, financially they are inaccessible to many residents of the region, he said.

Sasson has a unique connection with his Iraqi patients. His parents emigrated from Iraq when they, like other Jews living there decades ago, were forced to flee for their lives because they were Jewish. It’s like “closing a circle” to help the Iraqis, said Sasson.

As a testimony to the close bonds that can develop, Sasson said that during the Israeli-Hizballah war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 — when Israel was being hit by Hizballah missiles — he received a telephone call from the father of one of the Iraqi girls he had operated on, who was anxious to know if he was all right and if the hospital staff had shelters to protect them from the missiles, he said.

As for the Palestinians, Sasson said, he believes that mothers understand and appreciate what has been done for their children and know that Israelis and Palestinians can live together. And when the Israeli doctors save one Palestinian child, they like to think that they have touched an extended family, which often encompasses a whole village, he said.

But that is not always the case.

Egypt — the first Arab country to establish diplomatic ties with Israel in 1979 — refuses to send children here, said Dr. Sion Houri, director of the Pediatric ICU at the Wolfson Medical Center.

“[There are] plenty of Egyptians who are dying at this moment because they are not being treated for congenital heart disease, and we would love to take care of them…but there is an incredible barrier,” Houri said. He attributed the reluctance at least in part to anti-Semitism.

There was one case in which an Egyptian child was set to receive treatment here, but when the parents understood where the child was to be treated, they said they would rather see the child die than receive treatment in Israel, said Houri.

The cost of treating each child is $10,000 — $7,000 of which is paid to the Wolfson Medical Center, $2,000 for housing the children and transportation, and the rest for overhead and administrative costs, said Fisher. SACH foots most, if not all, of the bill.

The children from Iraq are brought to Israel via Jordan by a Christian organization called Shevet Achim (Light to the Nations), founded by an American Christian, Jonathan Miles, in 1994. The group, which also brings children from Gaza, contributes about a third of the expenses for the children it handles.

Shevet Achim is dedicated to reconciliation of different cultures through healing, said Alex Pettet, the group’s Jerusalem director.

During their stay before and after treatment, the children (including the Iraqi children), who are sometimes accompanied by a parent and sometimes by an escort from their country, are housed in a home not far from the hospital. All their needs are provided for there.

A month ago, there were 17 children staying at the home at various stages of treatment — including six Iraqis, one from Zanzibar, six from Ethiopia, and for the first time, three from Kenya. Some of the children must go through two or more surgeries.

Sarah told Cybercast News Service that her little girl was much better following her first surgery. (She has since undergone a second successful operation.)

The doctors took very good care of her daughter — like she was an Israeli, said Sarah. She said she feels like she’s at home here — only in her country, no one gave her the financial help she needed for her daughter’s life-saving surgery, she said.