1: What are you trying to accomplish?
2: What's your evidence that you can accomplish it?
3: How is it possible that you can provide an open heart surgery in Iraq for less than $1,000? Is that the full cost?
4: So is that the same thing as saying that my donation doesn't really make a difference? That the "up to 85%" funded locally by those inside Iraq is all that is really necessary to make this work?
5: Any other costs?
6: What is the bottleneck to more surgeries: money or skilled labor?
7: I'm skeptical of non-profits and charities because they always seem to be asking for more money. How can I be sure that Preemptive Love Coalition has "room for more funding" and that I'm not paying into a huge savings account, "Rainy Day Fund", or something similar?
8: Do you have enough volunteer surgeons available for unfunded Remedy Missions? (i.e., are there trips that you could fund if you had more money, or is there a labor bottleneck?)
9: Many heart surgeries require follow-up treatment (including additional surgeries). Do you have a way of providing these to patients?
10: How do you assess whether surgeries are completed competently and appropriately?
11: What is the rate of complications during and following surgery?
12: How do you assess whether surgeons are performing additional surgeries that they would have not had the funding or motivation to perform otherwise?
13: How do you assess whether surgeons are charging their patients for the surgeries you fund?
14: Do you follow up with the surgeons you've trained to assess whether they are correctly applying their training?
15: What information is available on the activities - and competence - of the surgeons you've trained?
16: Where do surgeons work after completing training? Do they serve poor patients?
17: How much do you spend each year on "program" expenses and how much on "overhead?"


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 Q: What are you trying to accomplish?

A: Train Iraqi heart surgeons and nurses so they can eradicate the backlog of tens of thousands of Iraqi children waiting in line for lifesaving heart surgery. [Back to Top]

 Q: What's your evidence that you can accomplish it?

A: Each year we continue to increase Iraq's total number of pediatric cardiac surgeries with new surgeries in Iraqi centers that would not - indeed could not - have been accomplished otherwise. Ministry of Health (MOH) officials speculate 500 surgeries were accomplished in 2009 (of which we provided 23 - 4.6% - outside the country). The addition of our 82 surgeries in FY 2010 - to the 500 baseline - for a total of 582 approximated surgeries, represents an increase created by PLC of 14% over 2009. In FY 2011 we anticipate increasing Iraq's total number of pediatric cardiac surgeries to at least 719 (or another 19% over FY 2010 directly attributable to our surgeons and our training).

Each year the local teams with which we work will become more proficient, and each year they will independently take on a larger case load than they could have the year before. None of these figures yet account for that additional output.

In March 2010 the Iraqi Ministry of Health asked us to expand our work to three additional sites. In May 2010 we began additional discussions about establishing a fellowship program in which international surgeons and nurses would take up residence in the Iraqi system to train locally for 40 weeks out of the year.

Our model does not rely strictly on volunteers because the level of need in Iraq outstrips what we could reasonably supply through volunteer labor alone. Accordingly, we set our budgets so as to actually contract the international surgical and nursing staff we need to accomplish our mission.

Sure, this increases the cost-per-mission (and thereby, cost-per-child) over early "mission" models in which volunteerism was idealized and training was not necessarily prioritized. But our contract labor + volunteerism model is inarguably the only way to create a nationwide quarterly training program and fellowships inside Iraq with international experts across approximately 6-8 surgical sites. Moreover, our model does not face the same sluggishness of learning that other surgery organizations suffer because we do not have the same rates of turnover; we have incredible consistency across our programs and missions. [Back to Top]

 Q: How is it possible that you can provide an open heart surgery in Iraq for less than $1,000? Is that the full cost?

A: The "less than $1k" numbers we routinely publish represent the amount in "program costs" we spend from our international donor money. The figure does not necessarily account for every single management, overhead, or fundraising expense.

Our total expenditures for FY 2010 were $188,919. We performed 82 surgeries during the same period for a per child total of $2,304 (though this data is a bit moot moving into 2010-11 as we abandon our very expensive "surgery exports" program(s) in Turkey, etc. and focus henceforth on more cost-effective in-country surgeries alone).

When all of our Remedy Mission partners are taken into consideration - including the Iraqi Government, medical companies that donate medicines and supplies, and local organizations - the real Remedy Mission cost to all donors is in the range of $5,400 - $7,000. Put another way, up to 85% of the total cost of a single surgical/training mission is now subsidized by local, Iraqi constituent institutions. [Back to Top]

 Q: So is that the same thing as saying that my donation doesn't really make a difference? That the "up to 85%" funded locally by those inside Iraq is all that is really necessary to make this work?

A: There is not a single site across Iraq for which our Remedy Missions are fully funded. If we fail to provide our 15-19% of the overall budget, Remedy Missions fail, surgeons and nurses do not get trained regularly, on-site audits from our international team do not happen, up to 20 children are delayed from receiving surgery, and a few may even die or become inoperable. Your role in funding the remaining 15-19% is as critical in the short term as any other entity. A single Remedy Mission is binary - it either happens or it doesn't. Your money makes it happen. But our goal is to continue to graduate all our programs so they are 100% funded locally in the next 5-10 years. [Back to Top]

 Q: Any other costs?

A: Our numbers per Remedy Mission do not account for "indirect costs," such as the cost (or value) of our volunteer medical staff from around the world, costs to local healthcare systems, the cost of a family to travel to the surgery site, the opportunity costs of lost income for families as they wait for surgery, etc. The reason we think it's important to note this here is because lifesaving is actually quite difficult. Building a pediatric cardiac surgery system for the entire country of Iraq is laborious and full of complexities. [Back to Top]

 Q: What is the bottleneck to more surgeries: money or skilled labor?

A: People often assume that the biggest need is more Iraqi heart surgeons. We could use a few more, but the real bottleneck is skilled nurses, technicians, and non-surgical physicians. A surgeon is only as good as his support staff. One of our biggest challenges is training pediatric cardiac intensive care nurses. To date, we haven't found a better model than our Remedy Missions through which we bring quarterly hands-on training to local nurses (and surgeons) in Iraq. Rather than exporting the nurses to Europe or the USA for training (whose medical systems barely resemble the Iraqi system), we train them with what they have on hand in their local environment. [Back to Top]

 Q: I'm skeptical of non-profits and charities because they always seem to be asking for more money. How can I be sure that Preemptive Love Coalition has "room for more funding" and that I'm not paying into a huge savings account, "Rainy Day Fund", or something similar?

A: For the record, we are skeptical of non-profits as well! In 2012 PLC needs $350,000 on hand at any given time to cover our cash flow needs for up to three Remedy Missions per quarter. We are still 30% under-funded against that goal. In addition to cash flow needs, we still require 15-19% funding on most of our missions after local sources contribute their portion; we have un-funded pilot programs in new cities where local doctors have been requesting our help (but where weve yet to woo local philanthropists or health directors); and we have research and social service initiatives through our Followthrough program that require funding at present because we have not yet sought local funding for those initiatives (seeing as how they relate mostly to our Monitoring & Impact Evaluation objectives). Please see our "Funding Gap" page to look deeper into our anticipated program costs, the sources of funding we are counting on, and the funding gap between the two for the next few years. [Back to Top]

 Q: Do you have enough volunteer surgeons available for unfunded Remedy Missions? (i.e., are there trips that you could fund if you had more money, or is there a labor bottleneck?)

A: Great question! We use a hybrid volunteer/staff model. Roughly 25-30% of any one of our Remedy Mission teams is employed by the International Children's Heart Foundation (typically the surgeon, scrub nurse, anesthesiologist, ICU doctor, and often a part-time ICU nurse). The remainder of the team typically comprises volunteer physicians, technicians, and nurses from across the world. Because the hardest-to-come-by positions are contract labor for us and NOT volunteers, we have never failed to run a mission for lack of personnel. We have only cancelled or turned down a request for a future mission due to lack of funding. [Back to Top]

 Q: Many heart surgeries require follow-up treatment (including additional surgeries). Do you have a way of providing these to patients?

A: Yes, we do. Our model dictates quarterly visits to each program site (a hospital inside a regional hub). Our reliance on local cardiologists ensures that the local team prioritizes and almost entirely sets the agenda for patient selection (within a development curricula) - after all, Iraqi doctors are the ones who are most intimately connected to the patients and their daily progress! When a local cardiologist sees a child who has either (1) deteriorated and requires another intervention or (2) advanced as expected to the next step of a complex, staged intervention, the child is prioritized for follow-up treatment. [Back to Top]

 Q: How do you assess whether surgeries are completed competently and appropriately?

A: Because we are a broker and play a combination administrative and financier role in the coalition of partners working in Iraq to develop pediatric cardiac care, we are able to stand in-between the local surgical team and the international surgical team (whom we contract as a third-party to train and perform surgeries in Iraq). If the local team or health directorate suspects a lack of competence in the international team, a cavalier attitude, or a single poor judgement call, our role is to be the go-between - to be the advocate for the local healthcare providers vis-a-vis the international surgical team.

Similarly, if the international surgical team feels pushed by the local surgical team to perform procedures with which they are uncomfortable or for which they think the local system is ill-prepared, they are able to refuse children for surgery and/or use us (PLC) as a go-between.

The checks-and-balance between the two teams helps us ensure surgeries are performed in a competent, appropriate manner. [Back to Top]

 Q: What is the rate of complications during and following surgery?

A: We report our in-hospital and 60-day mortality after each Remedy Mission. You can finds those numbers here. We also produce reports after each Remedy Mission detailing the trip, including data on intraoperative complications, post-operative complications, and mortality. You can find those reports here. We are also deliberately raising the funds necessary to help us bring our various heart hospitals into compliance with the International Quality Improvement Collaborative for Congenital Heart Surgery in Developing Countries. If this kind of quality improvement and reporting initiative interests you, we are currently looking for financial partners for our Followthrough program. [Back to Top]

 Q: How do you assess whether surgeons are performing additional surgeries that they would have not had the funding or motivation to perform otherwise?

A: Pediatric heart surgery in Iraq is almost nonexistent without our work. There are two active programs for relatively simple surgeries (one in Erbil and one in Baghdad). Local surgeons claim that combined they perform no more than a few hundred pediatric surgeries a year. In every location where we work, pediatric heart surgery is effectively nonexistent. Therefore, every surgery performed at our program sites (both when we are present and when we are not) are "additional surgeries" that they would not have had the SKILL to perform without the FUNDING we employed to train them in their local environment. [Back to Top]

 Q: How do you assess whether surgeons are charging their patients for the surgeries you fund?

A: Because we work in public (government) hospitals - and because healthcare in Iraq is provided almost entirely free of charge - it is widely known that any cardiologist, surgeon, or administrator seeking compensation for services is acting outside of Iraqi law. [Back to Top]

 Q: Do you follow up with the surgeons you've trained to assess whether they are correctly applying their training?

A: We see them quarterly in their local environment and perform real-time audits of their skills, recollection of past training, application of new techniques, etc. Additionally, our international surgeon remains on call at any time via phone, Skype, or email for consultation. [Back to Top]

 Q: What information is available on the activities - and competence - of the surgeons you've trained?

A: Because our Remedy Mission training program only began in late 2010 - and pediatric heart surgery at our sites across Iraq is the same age - there is still relatively little independent practice to report, and therefore little data on the activities and competence of our surgeons and their teams. But as they begin performing more surgeries independently, we are trying to align each site/surgical team with the International Quality Improvement Collaborative for Congenital Heart Surgery in Developing Countries (a data collection and tracking initiative of Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard University). [Back to Top]

 Q: Where do surgeons work after completing training? Do they serve poor patients?

A: As of Q2 2011 there was only one private hospital in Iraq (to our knowledge) providing pediatric heart surgery (and those surgeries were on the lower end of the complexity scale). Our work does not necessarily mean to exclude private hospitals as they continue to come online and become viable options, but at present the government system has a better equipped foundation for training local surgical teams. As we look to fully graduate our local surgical teams in the next 5-10 years, we imagine that most of them will stay in the public sector for all of the stability, pensions, and benefits of loyalty provided to those who stick with it. But, undoubtedly, some will seek positions at private hospitals (assuming private hospitals are willing to invest in the requisite capital purchases necessary to establish a credible program). In the public sector, rich and poor are served alike. In the private sector, poorer patients would be at an obvious disadvantage. [Back to Top]

 Q: How much do you spend each year on "program" expenses and how much on "overhead?"

A: As a rule, we do not adhere to the model that claims that "overhead" is somehow bad and "program" is somehow good. There are very bad program expenses. There are overhead expenses that are excellent investments. We agree with Paul Brest, President of the Hewlett Foundation, when he said, "Achieving a low overhead ratio drives many charities to behaviors that make them less effective and means more, not less, wasted dollars." Therefore, we spend as much on overhead as we need to accomplish our mission. The mission itself is our North Star - not arbitrary (even harmful) standards about overhead-vs-program expenditures. For the record, however, you can find a current pie chart of our expenditures here (and if you're into that sort of thing, you'll probably be impressed!). [Back to Top]

Jeremy Courtney Founder, Executive Director Twitter: @Jeremy_Courtney

“I'd love to hear any critique or questions you might have!”

DROP A NOTE OR DONATION BY MAIL: Preemptive Love Coalition 1300 Darbyton Dr. Hewitt, TX 76643 GIVE BY PHONE: To make a gift over the phone, using your credit card (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover), please call +1 (806) 853-9131 during normal business hours. IRAQ OFFICE: +964 770-355-6298 (local)

At Home With Hussain—A Followthrough Checkup

January 31, 2013 by matt · Leave a Comment 

People sometimes ask us, “So, what happens to these kids after surgery?”

It’s a great question, but it isn’t easily answered. Thanks to you and our partners, we’re now providing exponentially more surgeries than we did during our early years. What once was 20 children per year is now 20 children per mission—over 300 children this year alone!

With that kind of volume, it’s difficult to keep up with all the families we help. But we still work to follow up with as many as we can; to make sure they don’t slip through the cracks. But the nature of that Followthrough has changed. Now we spend time encouraging local doctors to follow up with families, reminding them to call families for post-operative check-ups.

And, due to safety concerns, it’s often easier for families to come see us at the hospital (the last thing we want is to disrespect our hosts!).

Going cowboy and riding a taxi into downtown Fallujah to visit a family is not a good way to maintain relationships with partners and friends of the program.

One misstep could lead to someone getting hurt, the program getting canceled, and children not getting their hearts fixed—not something we’re willing to risk.

So we’re tip-toeing into these home visits with care, and Hussain was our first. Stay tuned for (hopefully) many more to come!

As Communication Director, Matt Willingham spends most of his time trying to get the word out on PLC's work in Iraq. On the side, he likes reading stories, devouring the great food his wife cooks up, and DSLR camera work. He's also mildly obsessed with Twitter: @mehtin.

“Thank You For Save Her, Sir!” Proud Parents Bring Back A Healthy, Adorable Sema

September 13, 2012 by matt · Leave a Comment 

Every mission I could swear I’d met the cutest child on the planet, they’re always one-upping each other. But today this little jewel was carried into the hospital break room, and I’m quite sure she takes the cake. And the crazy thing is, I’d already met her and didn’t realize it!

Her name is Sema (pronounced seh-mah), and she was the first arterial switch operation to be performed in Najaf last February. She was actually one of the first operations from Remedy Mission IX, and now she’s back for a post-op screening (just to make sure everything’s working alright).

Since our last encounter, Sema has learned how to smile, clap, eat on her own, and her skin is now a nice, life-like hue—as opposed to the blueberry tone she had before. Her parents were ecstatic and insisted that I take photos—a dream come true for any photographer!

After Sema had thoroughly won all of us over, her father grabbed Dr. Novick’s hand and, with a cracking voice and moist eyes, said, “Thank you for save her, sir!” His joy was a great reminder of why we do what we do, and it was a great reminder of how desperate these parents are. As you can imagine, the entire team was encouraged by their visit.

But Sema and her sweet smile wouldn’t be with us today if it weren’t for you—you gave money to make sure these Remedy Missions happen, and Sema is a testament to that. Would you consider giving again? Click here to donate and to help us save more children like Sema—we can’t do this without you!

As Communication Director, Matt Willingham spends most of his time trying to get the word out on PLC's work in Iraq. On the side, he likes reading stories, devouring the great food his wife cooks up, and DSLR camera work. He's also mildly obsessed with Twitter: @mehtin.

Baby Blue to Rosy Red—Two Years Later and Iman is Doing Great Thanks To You!

May 31, 2012 by Craig · Leave a Comment 

Nearly two years ago, we began our first Remedy Mission with the International Children’s Heart Foundation and Living Light International. For us it was a great risk to take. We had only sent children out of the country and, all-in-all, that model was proven. It was safe.

But thanks to your support, we were able to begin training doctors and treating children inside Iraq. And we were able to serve a little girl named Iman (along with 23 other children). Now, just under two years later, here she is:

Iman is from Dohuk where our partner doctor, Dr. Kirk Milhoan, and his team screened newborns for heart defects. Now Iman is happy and healthy, able to enjoy playing games with her friends, learning in school, and spending time with her family.

Safe at last from her childhood disease, Iman’s life is full of potential. Thank you for giving these children a future!

Craig's Mom is our hero. She brought not one, but two sets of twins into the world, and Craig is the best that we've met of his siblings. As our copy editing intern, he is spending his summer serving Iraqi children through writing and editing, and on the side he enjoys playing Taboo, hanging out in teashops at night, and jamming out to classical piano music.

We just got off the phone with Hussain’s dad!

April 5, 2012 by matt · Comments Off 

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You can help us answer that last question. We hope to give Hussain his operation at the end of this month, but we need your help bringing the doctors back. Visit Hussain’s page to give toward his surgery and to help give him a new heart!

P.S.—We’re half way toward reaching our financial goal for Hussain! Help us ensure surgery for him by donating below.

As Communication Director, Matt Willingham spends most of his time trying to get the word out on PLC's work in Iraq. On the side, he likes reading stories, devouring the great food his wife cooks up, and DSLR camera work. He's also mildly obsessed with Twitter: @mehtin.

Apart From Us Interrupting Her Nap, Deeya Is Doing Great!

October 25, 2011 by matt · 1 Comment 

Look who we just visited!

Deeya’s scar is now over 14 months old, and her mother happily reported that her daughter has started school and is doing extremely well. She used the Kurdish phrase joolay zora, meaning “she moves a lot” to describe how active her daughter has become.

We missed out on that activity during our visit, though, because we arrived in the middle of Deeya’s nap. I’d love to show you a photo of her sweet smile, but sometimes kids just don’t feel it.

Our inclination is to show you extremes: big, beaming smiles or desperately needy faces. But we all know that isn’t a true representation of most kids on most days. We have good days and bad days, but the important thing is the fact that now, thanks to you and our capable doctors, Deeya will actually live to have days, both good and bad!

Her life has been saved, and she is now healthy to be as joyful and irritable as any other child. Thank you for making that possible, and thank you for loving these children with us – even when we show you their groggy photos.

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Our upcoming Remedy Mission VII will give you the opportunity to love even more sick children. Join us in counting down to the first day of surgery on Nov 6th!

As Communication Director, Matt Willingham spends most of his time trying to get the word out on PLC's work in Iraq. On the side, he likes reading stories, devouring the great food his wife cooks up, and DSLR camera work. He's also mildly obsessed with Twitter: @mehtin.

Parzheen is doing great, and we’re stuffed!

April 25, 2011 by Cody · 1 Comment 

If you’d have been in Iraq this week, you would have been invited to this feast.

It was a feast celebrating another healthy heart from our most recent Remedy Mission in northern Iraq.

Parzheen and her family invited us to come for a medical checkup and to see the rest of the family, including Parzheen’s grandparents and to spend a day with them in their village. All of this was to thank YOU for saving the life of their daughter!

It was a perfect day. Together with Parzheen and her family we filled the village with laughter as we filled ourselves with the most delicious Kurdish food.

Everything around their home was in full bloom. The turkey’s were gobbling. The chickens were out searching for worms. The garden was beginning to show signs of life. Parzheen was outside playing and keeping up with all of her brothers and sisters, things she couldn’t do before her heart surgery.

It was all perfect and we left Parzheen with a check up that was just as perfect. She’s doing great!

Our Followthrough Program is gaining momentum as we continue to see children each week that were served during our last Remedy. Stay tuned to see more of the stories you’ve forever changed!

On behalf of Parzheen, her family and all of us at PLC, thank you for saving her life!

Cody Fisher is the co-founder and Development Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He moved to Iraq in 2007 where he met his wife and since then they've been waging peace and mending hearts across Iraq. His passions are photography, peacemaking, and food that doesn't come out of a can. You can follow him on Twitter: @candmfisher.

Leah’s Story Exemplefies The Need For Followthrough

April 22, 2011 by Cayla · 1 Comment 

As a new member of the PLC team, there’s always something to learn. One of the first things on the to-learn list was how to answer the question, “What’s your job?” in Kurdish. I usually use the term ‘social worker’ to describe what I do, so I asked my language tutor how to say that in Kurdish and she explained that there isn’t a word for it because there isn’t really a job like that in our city.

Because women tend to stay home, the need for a family advocate/social worker to come to them is huge. Unfortunately the need isn’t widely seen, and in many homes even basic healthcare knowledge is lacking.

Last week I went with our family services director, Jessica Courtney, to visit Leah, one of the children who received surgery in March. Jessica was there in the ICU to help Leah’s mom understand the importance of a feeding tube and, for the second time, I got to see her comfort and inform this worried mother about medicines, dosages and how to help her child recover.

Hospital trips and caring for a sick child can be fearful times, and mothers need someone they can rely on. We hope to be that for them.

Leah’s mother wouldn’t have understood the urgency of a feeding tube or her baby’s need for consistent medication if Jessica hadn’t been there.

This is why we Followthrough.

Cayla Willingham is Remedy Mission Coordinator and Family Advocate. When she isn't spending time with families, she enjoys cooking, hosting friends, haggling in local bazaars and souks, and learning local languages.

Followthrough Is Central To Why We Choose To Live In Country

April 18, 2011 by matt · Comments Off 

People had a lot of questions when my wife and I said we wanted to move to Iraq. Family and friends were (understandably) concerned, and we had to be ready with a response about our work, our safety, and pretty much everything else involved in moving to a wartorn country.

Most questions weren’t difficult to answer. Some were difficult for people to hear, for sure, but we knew our responses.

But there was one question that took some thinking. An older man (in front of a crowd of 200 people, I might add) asked, “Why can’t you just facilitate the surgeries from the United States? Why do you have to live there?” I remember fidgeting a little and saying something about the importance of caring and equipping in-person.

If I had another shot at answering that question, though, I wouldn’t fidget: Followthrough would be my answer.

If we’re going to put an end to this backlog of sick children, it’s going to take the daily training, equipping and relationship-building of our Followthrough team.

We could certainly live stateside. It’d probably make fundraising easier, and we could swoop into Iraq like whites in shining armor, save a whole bunch of lives and then make our grand exit.

But that would be more about us than about what the people of Iraq are actually asking for.

Many of Iraq’s best and brightest either fled or were killed under Saddam Hussein’s regime, and subsequently the nation as a whole suffered a massive braindrain. So what Iraqis need, is training, information, and empowerment to restore their country to what it once was (and beyond!), and that’s where Followthrough comes in.

We aren’t handing out prescriptions and orders, but we are here if they have any questions – and they have a lot! How to bathe a child post-op, which medications to take, how to avoid an infection, and if/when they should go in for post-op checkups are just a few of the many questions parents are asking.

But the medical training is just one part of it all. We want to know the people we’re working with and to understand them; their worldview, their joys, their concerns, beliefs and fears.

Followthrough is our way of saying no to life in the proverbial ivory tower and yes to an in-the-flesh kind of compassion that ultimately blesses and benefits us as we’re working to bless and benefit the people of Iraq.

Photo credit: Tech Trends

As Communication Director, Matt Willingham spends most of his time trying to get the word out on PLC's work in Iraq. On the side, he likes reading stories, devouring the great food his wife cooks up, and DSLR camera work. He's also mildly obsessed with Twitter: @mehtin.

Intro To Followthrough: How Mothers Will Change The Tide In Iraq

April 8, 2011 by Cody · 1 Comment 

We’re all about providing surgeries to children – I think we’ve made that pretty clear – but we’re also passionate about getting the rest of the family involved.

That means we aren’t standing by an entire generation of children with CHD but also the communities, the support groups, and the leaders who play a crucial role in improving local healthcare throughout the country.

Without a doubt, some of Iraq’s strongest leaders are the mothers.

They’re leading the way by asking real questions about proper nutrition, pre-natal care, post-op rehabilitation for their children, the causes of heart defects, and how they can be a part of the solution. They aren’t content to be bystanders.

And these questions are encouraging, because they prove that mothers here see that something’s wrong, and they want to do something about it.

That’s why our Followthrough program is seeking to unite mothers all over Iraq and give them the tools they need to be the remedy. Then, once they’ve been equipped, we set them loose to pass it on to the next mother.

‘Equipping’ here means educating them on the value of healthcare, what robust nutrition looks like here with the available foods in Iraq, how to look after children with heart disease, and how all of this will help lower the rate of children born with heart defects each year.

Educating and empowering mothers to better care for their children is the first step toward attacking this CHD problem at the source.

We want them to know that it doesn’t take a PhD to fight heart disease. We all can play a role.

Imagine women all over Iraq, representing multiple ethnicities, faiths, and tribes, all united together with the common goal – to create a better future for their children!

Stick with us during the coming weeks to see how moms are changing the tide in Iraq!

Cody Fisher is the co-founder and Development Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition. He moved to Iraq in 2007 where he met his wife and since then they've been waging peace and mending hearts across Iraq. His passions are photography, peacemaking, and food that doesn't come out of a can. You can follow him on Twitter: @candmfisher.

House Visit with Yousif Challenges PLC Intern

June 23, 2010 by Claire · Comments Off 

Last week a small group of PLC staff and interns visited Yousif in his village. As we wove through neighborhoods I noticed the muted and dull colors of the concrete walls, gates, roads and air. Amidst the tan, beige and dirt-colored village I kept seeing flashes of bright blues, oranges and reds — colors of the town’s vibrantly dressed residents behind gates and in shops. Their clothes fought my initial impression of his village. When we drove in, it almost looked like a ghost town, but once I started to see the villagers I saw the life and personality of the people shown through their clothing.

We arrived at Yousif’s home, and I was privileged to meet a woman whose personality quite literally burst through the front gate. Yousif’s mother had been summoned in from the field by her daughters because of our arrival. She flew in holding Yousif’s hand, wearing a work shirt and a pair of tattered juli kurdi pants — baggy pants traditionally reserved for men only. This woman oozed strength, confidence and know-how. She appeared as if she could build a house from the ground up, run a farm and raise her 10 children all at the same time. This was a woman I should learn from. There is a good chance I will never work as hard in a week as she does in a day.

Four of Yousif’s sisters brought us water, tea, grapes and cucumbers. Lessons in hospitality are not only something I could learn from this family but from all the Iraqi people. Despite the delicious drinks and snacks it was not long before we were itching to play with the kids. Little did Yousif know, there was a soccer ball in the car with his name on it. Yousif and his siblings had few toys and had to borrow a ball from kids down the street during PLC’s last visit. The ball was brought out and a game quickly ensued, but soon it came time to leave because Yousif’s mother had to get back to work.

As we were walking to the car Yousif’s brother ran out of the gate holding the soccer ball he thought we had forgotten. I was blown away. A child with very little access to his own soccer ball thought we had accidentally left behind this gift and instead of rejoicing and trying to keep it, he chased after us and attempted to give it back.

Time and time again I am humbled by the children and families we work with because of their dedication to hard work and hospitality. And through that dedication, I’ve seen that this family chose to focus on the vigor of life rather than on the fact that their family is dealing with a congenital heart defect.

Claire is passionate about family advocacy projects and seeing support groups develop in Iraq for women whose children battle congenital heart disease. In her spare time you can find her laughing at her own jokes.

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OUR BLOGGERS

	Matt Willingham is the PLC press secretary and writes primarily on politics, history, general updates and visual peacemaking through photography and film.
	Cody Fisher is a PLC cofounder and writes primarily on program development and peacemaking by giving us a lens into the lives of the real people we love.
	Jeremy Courtney is a PLC cofounder and writes primarily to emphasize our vision and values, including organizational and financial transparency.

Preemptive Love Coalition provides lifesaving heart surgeries for Iraqi children in pursuit of peace between communities at odds. We offer the untold thousands of Iraqi kids suffering from life-threatening heart defects a chance at the surgery they need to save their lives. With our world-class international surgical partners, we create long-term solutions by training local Iraqi doctors and nurses so they can sustainably save lives without our help.

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