Saving Little Hearts in Tanzania

Due to a lack of infrastructure, finance, and training, doctors in Tanzania are unable to perform open heart surgery on such young children, and so they were unable to help her. After hearing an announcement on the radio, she and her mother made a three-hour bus ride to Mwanza, as they knew the only hope for Laurencia’s very serious heart condition was to receive care from the Save a Child’s Heart medical team.

“For the past two years, Laurencia has been too sick to go to school,” says Laurencia’s mother Paulina Bujiku, 27 years old. “We’ve been coming to the Bugando medical center once a month, but what Laurencia needs is an operation. Thanks to Save a Child’s Heart, she’s about to get it. I’m scared, but I have faith,” Paulina said before the surgery.

After a long surgery, Laurencia is recovering well. “It required incredible team work to create an operating room that could meet our needs,” says Dr. Lior Sasson, chief surgeon [for] Save a Child’s Heart and head of the Cardiothoracic Surgery Department at Wolfson Medical Center in Jerusalem. “But we did it—we created an environment where we could carefully and conscientiously perform open heart surgery, and we saved the life of little Laurencia. What can I say? I feel incredibly proud.”

“There are about 200 sick Tanzanian children who will be examined by the Save a Child’s Heart team,” says Dr. Akiva Tamir, chief cardiologist at Save a Child’s Heart and the head of the Pediatric Cardiology Unit at Wolfson. “I am checking over 20 children every day, and we all are committed to doing whatever it takes to help them and save their lives.” Eight to ten surgeries took place in Tanzania. The rest of the children who need operations were to be flown to Israel this upcoming year with all expenses paid by the organization.

Since its inception in 1996, the Save a Child’s Heart medical team has treated over 2,600 children from 42 countries and has examined and evaluated more than 6,000 children. Once the surgeries were completed 13 volunteers and supporters climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak, to raise [US] $1 million dollars in order to save the lives of another 100 children.