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Deelan Calls Daddy in Iraq: “I’m Coming Home!”
March 11, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
Press the “forward” button above to view and read the captioned slideshow about Deelan’s journey through surgery and the phone call to his daddy in Iraq that brought tears to our eyes!
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Follow Deelan on Twitter: @DeelanKameran. Subscribe to Deelan’s updates via RSS HERE. Follow Deelan’s thread of longer stories (with pictures & video) on the PLC blog HERE.
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
Meet Sara (Twitter: SaraMuaeed)
March 4, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
Meet Sara. Sara hails from the still contested, disputed, and much-disrupted city of Kirkuk, Iraq. So disrupted, in fact, that there were reportedly four bomb explosions in Kirkuk the day before Sara left for Turkey.
Sara’s father works in a local anti-terrorist security unit. Given the backdrop of “Arabization” reaching back decades, conventional Kurdish storytelling now often says that all the terrorists are Arabs and that all the danger lives in the Arab part of city.
Those of us at the Preemptive Love Coalition can speak to that terrible stereotype by referencing our own run-ins with Kurdish terror conspirators. So in hopes of tearing down harmful stereotypes, we’re excited that Sara’s family has drawn so close to baby Deelan’s mother during their surgical sojourn together in Turkey - because Deelan’s mother is an Arab from Kirkuk.
We brought Sara to surgery because of a valve problem she is having that is threatening her life and possibly the life of her future children. At 14 years old, the window of operability for Sara is narrowing. And if she had not experienced your kindness and received surgery, she would likely die during pregnancy or childbirth due to the extreme toll such changes take on the body.
Today, under the skill of Prof. Dr. Sertaç Çiçek, Sara will receive the valve repair she needs and - GOD willing - will be set free to enjoy her adolescent and adult life with much joy and little fear.
Sara is scheduled for surgery on Thursday. More to come…
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Special thanks to the college students of FWCM.org for their phenomenal $14,800+ two week fundraising campaign for Sara and one other child. Your passion and effectiveness in fundraising is a testament to the faith, values and lifestyle you profess. We’re looking for 12 other houses of worship, schools, and clubs to partner with us in 2010. For more on our 2010 Fifty Family Focus, click here. |
Follow Sara on Twitter: @SaraMuaeed. Subscribe to Sara’s updates via RSS HERE. Follow Sara’s thread of longer stories (with pictures & video) on the PLC blog HERE.
*In accordance with PLC’s desire to lend a hand-up by avoiding strict hand-outs (when possible), Sara’s family contributed $6,500 towards PLC’s highly-discounted surgery prices.
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
Meet Deelan (Twitter: @DeelanKameran)
March 2, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
Deelan arrived in Istanbul, Turkey last night on a plane from Iraq thanks to Atlasjet Airlines and the generous support they’ve offered to help us get this February group to surgery. If you are one of our summer interns, we highly recommend that you choose Atlasjet to fly into Iraq.
Our Family Services Director, Jessica Courtney, (who, if you’re keeping score at home, is also my wife) accompanied Deelan, his mother, and one other family to Istanbul last night to round out our February/March group of surgeries.
Special thanks to the Alice Abdi at the Anadolu Medical Center for the continual support, for staying late at the hospital to receive these dear kids, and for sending - as always - a special private van to pick up these fearful families. This keeps our costs low, speeds up our travel, and most importantly, shows the kind hearted desires of so many here in Turkey as they reach out to Kurds and the rest of the people of Iraq in providing these deeply discounted, life-saving heart surgeries.
Deelan is not doing well at all - crying nearly constantly and facing down dangerously high pulmonary pressure in addition to the huge hole between the lower two chambers of his heart .
Deelan is scheduled for surgery on Wednesday.
Follow Deelan on Twitter: @DeelanKameran. Subscribe to Deelan’s updates via RSS HERE. Follow Deelan’s thread of longer stories (with pictures & video) on the PLC blog HERE.
*In accordance with PLC’s desire to lend a hand-up by avoiding strict hand-outs (when possible), Deelan’s family contributed $5,000 towards PLC’s highly-discounted surgery prices.
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
Meet Baroof (Twitter: @BaroofAbdul)
March 1, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
Baroof is the fourth of the initial four children we brought with us to Iraq on February 23rd. He came to us through an organization in northern Iraq. When Prof. Dr. Sertaç Çiçek and his team saw Baroof in our Iraq screening two weeks ago, they wondered whether or not he would be operable. In any case, the window of operability was certainly closing quickly.
Baroof’s condition is known as an “aortopulmonary window” - or AP window - a rare heart defect in which a hole between the major blood vessel feeding the heart and the one going to the lungs. AP windows are so very rare they account for approximately .1% of all congenital heart defects according to U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Baroof was admitted to a diagnostic catheterization on Thursday night in which Dr. Levent from the Anadolu Medical Center determined he would be operable - and confirmed that he very much needed surgery… and fast.
More information to come on Baroof…
Follow Baroof on Twitter: @BaroofAbdul. Subscribe to Baroof’s updates via RSS HERE. Follow Baroof’s thread of longer stories (with pictures & video) on the PLC blog HERE.
*In accordance with PLC’s desire to lend a hand-up by avoiding strict hand-outs (when possible), Baroof’s family worked with the regional government and with personal and government funds contributed $6,000 towards PLC’s highly-discounted surgery prices.
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
Meet Dua (Twitter: @Dua_Arif)
February 24, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
We met Dua and her family through a partnering organization on the northern Iraq-Turkey border near the area where Dua lives. As a result, we’re just now getting to know her (whereas we’ve had relationship with some of these other families for months).
Dua was diagnosed in Iraq with “tricuspid atresia” - a defect that only accounts for 1-3% of all congenital heart defects. In short, this defect means there is an absence of the tricuspid valve. From Wikipedia (because a lot of other sites prohibit quoting their information!):
Therefore, there is an absence of right atrioventricular connection. This leads to a hypoplastic (undersized) or absent right ventricle. This defect is contracted during prenatal development, when the heart does not finish developing. It causes the heart to be unable to properly oxygenate the rest of the blood in the body. Because of this, the body does not have enough oxygen to live, and steps must be taken to keep the child alive.
And for bonus points, you can click here to read more on the Fontan procedure for which Dua is a candidate (though her operability is still undetermined).
Follow Dua Arif on Twitter: @Dua_Arif. Subscribe to Dua’s updates via RSS HERE. Follow Dua’s thread of longer stories (with pictures & video) on the PLC blog HERE.
*In accordance with PLC’s desire to lend a hand-up by avoiding strict hand-outs (when possible), Dua’s family worked with the regional government and with personal and government funds contributed $6,000 towards PLC’s highly-discounted surgery prices.
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
Meet Sozyar (Twitter: @SozyarHamdan)
February 24, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
The team of Turkish doctors personally pre-screened and selected Sozyar for surgery when they were with us in Iraq last week working with us to promote more local (Iraqi) solutions to these local problems.
Sozyar was referred to us by a local organization, saying she was in need of “urgent surgery.” Because of the tremendous cooperation of the Anadolu Medical Center and Prof. Dr. Sertaç Çiçek we are almost always able to fast track children like this and see them served before it’s too late. They visited us and we sent Sozyar to surgery in exactly two weeks. We could not do that without your faithful giving and the highly interested and capable Turkish team.
You can click here to read more on the Fontan procedure that the doctors plan on performing for Sozyar.
Follow baby Sozyar on Twitter: @SozyarHamdan. Subscribe to Sozyar’s updates via RSS HERE. Follow Sozyar’s thread of longer stories (with pictures & video) on the PLC blog HERE.
*In accordance with PLC’s desire to lend a hand-up by avoiding strict hand-outs (when possible), Sozyar’s family contributed $4,000 towards PLC’s highly-discounted surgery prices.
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
Meet Muhammed (Twitter: @MuhammedAdnan)
February 24, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
Muhammed’s presence in our life is a testament to the way the Preemptive Love Family Services Team has lived out our Core Values - namely, our pursuit of excellence (or constant improvement) and the way we seek to provide whole solutions for whole people. But all that sounds a little vague, so let me break it down…
In February 2009 a Kurdish soldier knocked on the door of our office. Though I hadn’t done anything wrong, I was sure I was about to be hauled in to give an account for something ridiculous. Thankfully, I was wrong. His name was Hywa and his daughter needed a life-saving surgery…. very urgently. We fast-tracked his family to surgery, but unfortunately he had already missed the optimal surgery window for his daughter when he first appealed to us. His little baby died in March 2009.
But Hywa and I formed a friendship that was somehow wrapped up in our mutual efforts to save his child’s life. When we put Honyar on that plane to Istanbul there was an initial feeling that we had both succeeded. And as I stayed back with him in Iraq, we cried together, somehow feeling like we had both failed that day she died. Of course, it was not the same grief for me as it was for him, and I would dishonor him to imply otherwise. But we celebrated, mourned, and grew together.
A few months later Hywa referred his friend Sami to us because Sami’s boy Danar was dying from a similar heart defect. We sent Danar to surgery in January 2010 and Danar can be seen doing really well after his surgery in our video of follow-up echos a few days ago.
After Danar returned from surgery, his father, Sami, referred Adnan to us because Adnan’s son is similarly facing death from extremely high pressure in his lungs as a result of two large holes in his heart.
Call it the “butterfly effect” or “serendipity” or “Providence” or a “job well done.” I’m really proud of our Family Services Team and all the work they’ve done to leave a lasting impact on families like Hywa, Sami, and… hopefully… little Muhammed’s family.
Follow Muhammed Adnan on Twitter: @MuhammedAdnan. Subscribe to Muhammed’s updates via RSS HERE. Follow Muhammed’s thread of longer stories (with pictures & video) on the PLC blog HERE.
*In accordance with PLC’s desire to lend a hand-up by avoiding strict hand-outs (when possible), Muhammed’s family told us they would sell their car to help their son and ultimately gave $6,500 towards PLC’s highly-discounted surgery prices.
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
Family Followthrough in Iraq: A Day of Post-operative Testing on Former Heart Surgery Recipients
February 22, 2010 by Jeremy · 1 Comment
Last week we were honored to have some of the excellent medical staff from the Anadolu Medical Center in Istanbul, Turkey make the trip to our office in Iraq to work with us on a few current and future initiatives. Among our agenda for the week:
The video above represents one of our agenda items for the week! In coming days we hope to post a photo narrative about the amazing alumni banquet and a story from local media about the Turkish delegation and PLC’s peacemaking agenda with them.
Don’t forget to push PLAY above to watch hope and life in motion!
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
OUR CORE VALUES: Long Term, Local Solutions
February 15, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
Dr. Aso Faek in his small clinic in northern Iraq where he sees hundreds of kids each month suffering from congenital heart disease. Photo: Matt Addington
Dr. Aso Faeq is a visionary and one of my personal heros. He is certainly one of the foremost long term, local solutions to runaway congenital heart disease as it faces the children and families of Iraq today. A shoemaker named, Aram, is another; as is a radio station director named Rawand; an information technologies guru at the Ministry of Councils who recently moved back from Dubai; a local television host and newspaper editor back from London; and a local women’s basketball coach.
Foreigners like us can be especially susceptible to thinking of ourselves as heros. We are not heros. We are part-time servants; we’re itinerate and our expiration date may be fast approaching. We will always be foreigners. Our kids have foreign names, and the pajamas we wear inside our house when no one else is looking bely the fact that - whatever we may look like on the street - we come from outside.
Luckily, the kids of Iraq are not left to outsiders to solve their problems. There are a slew of long term, local solutions to these local problems developing throughout Iraq every day. Many of these solutions are taking place tangential to us and we are riding along in their stream. But we do our best to ensure that all of our programs are geared toward empowerment so that Arab, Kurdish, and other minority Iraqis truly begin to own the vision for a better, more giving, more unified and agile response community.
A Kurdish shoemaker supplies us with a powerful symbol of grassroots action. Photo: Matt Addington
Our flagship program is called Buy Shoes. Save Lives. - based on a commerce model of selling fabulously produced local footwear to foreign markets. Through this program we consistently accomplish a number of things:
- * invest foreign and domestic capital into the local economy and provide jobs
- * use profit to fund heart surgeries for Iraqi kids
- * upgrade local production and management skills through emphasis on quality controls, inventory management, and by reducing supply chain inefficiencies
It sounds a little boring until you start looking at it through the eyes of a guy like Aram Majid, who puts food on his family’s table every night and hopes to one day send his daughters abroad for education because of the shoes he makes and the management skills he’s learning. Or look at it through the eyes of Kadeeja Mahdi, whose family paid for their portion of her surgery because of the shoes they’ve sold locally and through our Buy Shoes. Save Lives. program.
Lawen Azad - a local media maven - moonlights to organize a local-language Public Service Announcement about kids in Iraq suffering from congenital heart disease. Photo: Matt Addington.
The “long termness” of this solution does not lie primarily in the fact that these shoes have been produced by hand for the last 3,000 years. In fact, that trade is dying off in spades as the country modernizes. The take away from our commercial efforts in Iraq has more to do with shaping a culture of compassion; of teaching the benefit of doing business to do good for others outside of one’s immediate family network, even a stranger. And because we believe that a “compassion” that seeks to keep the peace but fails to work for the good of the other is no compassion at all, those who participate in our program learn the value of strict quality control measures, standardization, waste reduction, and innovation - and those are take-aways that they can readily apply to any industry, family discussion, or government office.
And because we’ve sought to make this shoe the centerpiece for our grassroots action throughout the world, it seems we’ve made it a little bit easier for many to see more clearly the simplicity of a single act to change the neighborhood or world around them. So we increasingly meet Kurds in London running for a child in Iraq; or a radio station putting on a campaign to save a life; or college students deciding that they’ve had enough waiting on the government for more handouts. Grassroots action in on the rise, and that is one of the most long-term, local solutions of all!
Dr. Aso is currently learning intervention - the ability to patch holes and perform other corrective measures without invasive (dangerous) surgery.
But all the money and good intentions in the world will mean nothing for the thousands of children in Iraq waiting in line for life-saving heart surgery without the local skill to cut into a child in hopes of patching a hole, fixing a valve, decreasing dangerous pressure, or “rearranging the pipes.” Thankfully, due to the similar vision of groups in Italy, Israel, and the Anadolu Medical Center in Istanbul, Turkey, there are men like Dr. Aso Faek who are increasingly ready to intervene on behalf of a child and be the local solution to their problem for years and years to come.
And one of the most exciting things about Dr. Aso is that nearly every time we go into his office he is training someone else, passing on the knowledge, preparing the next generation. When we walk through the halls mothers surround him for a chance to have their baby seen. If Bono himself were to walk the halls beside us he would be invisible. Dr. Aso is the hero here.
People like us just serve in the shadows.
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
OUR CORE VALUES: Multi-Dimensional Reconciliation
February 8, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
Photo: Matt Addington
Call it settling accounts, setting to rights, or the restoration of friendly relations - reconciliation is why we do what we do.
There are thousands of children in Iraq who are born with hearts “at odds” with the good intentions of GOD when He created the world. We want to set that physical situation to rights; to reconcile what is with what should be.
But a healed heart is an occasion for only a tempered celebration if your family is living in the middle of civil conflict between ethnic neighbors or regional superpowers. Sure, much of this strife comes from global issues that are beyond our direct reach. But a few days on the ground in Arab Iraq, Kurdish Iraq, Turkey, etc makes it clear that these “global issues” are exacerbated by our closely held opinions about “the other.”
Photo: Matt Addington
So we work to unravel the effects of evil that were wrought by Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaigns, by years of sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims, and by ethnic struggles.
For example, Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen are in a political (and possibly cultural) struggle over the historic city of Kirkuk - each laying some sort of ancient claim to the city; each group (generally) vilifying the other. On his Restorative Justice blog, Dr. Howard Zehr talks about our “temptation to emphasize ‘otherness’,” whether it be through photography, storytelling, or our administration of justice. At the Preemptive Love Coalition, we do not deny “otherness” when working between ethnic and tribal prejudices or religious worldview differences. But we try not to make “otherness” our starting point.
Communication guru Joseph Grenny talks about the important role that “storytelling” plays in our emotions and actions. According to Grenny, (1) we make an observation (e.g., Saddam Hussein was an Arab with largely Arab soldiers that attacked our city) and (2) immediately start telling ourselves a story (e.g., therefore all Arabs in Iraq want “our” land and are evil and would kill us if they had the chance) which (3) leads to strong emotions (like fear and hate), thereby (4) triggering fight/flight instincts inside us such as protectionist policies or aggressive police (or vigilante) action. The fork in the road is that first story we tell ourselves when faced with an observable fact.
Photo: Ben Hodson
Torture used by Saddam’s Baath Party in the “Red Security” building leaves an easy “observable fact” as the basis of an errant Kurdish story against all Arabs.
You can see how this plays out closer to home, as well. Observable fact: Men who wrapped themselves in Islam attacked America on September 11, 2001. But the stories that have flowed from that fact have been varied. And the emotions that arise from those stories have been serious and sincere. And over the past decade the actions that have come out of those various emotions have changed the course of world politics, international relations, and daily life for millions.
So when you donate, host an event, or buy a tshirt or pair of shoes, you are engaged in something bigger than the shuffling of money from one place to another to save a child’s life. We give people over “here” a tangible opportunity to save a life over “there” and to see “those” people as exactly that: people. Humans. Sons and daughters. We are all more than the images we receive from the professional media. It’s not “us” helping “them” get over “their” problems. It’s “us” becoming reconciled with “us”.
And in case you are wondering… Yes, we are just naive enough to believe that when we start seeing each less as other and more as brother these “global issues” might start to change too. And if they don’t… well, we are still committed to making change in the neighborhoods where we live and work; to be people of peace - whether anyone joins us on the journey or not.
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Jeremy Courtney lives and loves in Iraq as a co-founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He's also the father of two spectacular children, and married to the lovely Jessica Courtney. When not absorbed in PLC work he can be found writing songs and singing about hope and future. |
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