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Leena Returns to Iraq without Surgery
April 27, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
An shot from Leena’s catheter procedure revealing a misdiagnosis and heightened risk for surgery and post-operative course.
It was not an easy decision - and only the second time we’ve ever made it - but a misdiagnosis in Iraq brought us to a fork in the road in Istanbul: (a) take on a high-risk, complicated surgery with a long post-operative course or (b) use the limited resources we have at our disposal to provide a higher impact, less risky surgery for other children waiting in line.
These are not decisions that are easy enough to summarize in a few sentences. These are not “one-for-one” tradeoffs and the complexities can bring otherwise decisive, Type-A people to a complete deadlock. Leena is dear to us, irreplaceable to her family, and precious in the sight of GOD. But there are times when providing surgery for one feels like an act of treason against another. In our case, Leena was a last minute, highly urgent, highly complicated surgery who applied in the midst of our attempts to fulfill previous commitments to less complicated, less risky, more predictable children.
It broke our hearts and we made the decision slowly over 4-5 days through many tears and prayers. But in the end, we sent Leena back to Iraq.
We contacted our friends at Shevet Achim and asked them to consider Leena for surgery and found out that her cardiologist and Kurdistan Save the Children in Iraq had already made the appeal as well. We are very grateful to them for filling in for the family at a time when we were unable.
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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. |
In Tribute to a Fallen Friend
April 19, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
I learned yesterday that the man on the right (above) was assassinated in Baghdad by the Mehdi Militia of Moqtada al-Sadr. The man above is a friend and a partner in our efforts to wage peace in Iraq. In fact, it was his efforts to bridge gaps and stand down oppression that earned him the array of bullets and bombs that finally took his life at the hands of his enemies.
This is not a post to celebrate the Preemptive Love Coalition, me, or anyone other than the countless thousands of brave men and women in Iraq who face down these petulant bullies every day and get virtually no credit; no headline stories; no Facebook pages dedicated to their efforts; no trending topics on Twitter; no books written about their peaceful hearts or comparisons to Mother Teressa or Mohandas Gandhi.
I knew him as Abu Namis or “The father of Namis” - a typical way to be known in Iraq. So it was immediately striking. When I learned of his death, I thought of Namis, now fatherless because his dad worked across the aisle with a vision that far exceeded the atrophied imagination of his opponents.
The photo above is taken from my first meeting with him. The other two men in the picture - who are currently alive & well today الحمد لله - are sheikhs with whom we have worked to help children receive the heart surgeries they’ve needed. All three of these men are Sunni, but like so many un- and under-reported similar groups in Iraq, these men do not bow to the minority who argue for violence between Sunnis and Shi’as.
In that first meeting the man second from the right seemed stand-offish and suspicious. This photo itself seemed more an act of obligation than something born from a genuine desire to mark a memorable meeting after forging the beginnings of a partnership to take children to Turkey in conjunction with their Baghdad-based organization. But when the camera turned off, I put my hand on his shoulder and apologized for the things that had happened to his children, his neighbors, and his countrymen here in Iraq.
We frequently talk about the need to avoid lazy generalizations. All Arabs, Muslims, and Iraqis are not this way or that way. Nor am I America or Christianity. But I can apologize for myself - and I can do it honestly - because the truth is that I didn’t initially have many objections to a lot of the terrible things that happened in Iraq. But that was before “these people” had real names, real stories, and real lives in my eyes.
In an instant, that apology seemed to unlock his heart.An hour has passed inside our poorly lit apartment office and then - for the first time - he took off his glasses. He had seen me for an hour - but I had not been allowed to see him, hiding under a keffiyeh and sun shades. But now I was allowed in. I was still an outsider - but at least an outsider with a heart. And with the glasses off he looked at me and said “Thank you” as tears started coming down.
I’m not trying to be dramatic. But an assassination of a man I knew to be kind and who genuinely desired peace for his people is, in and of itself, dramatic! My main goal here is to honor his memory. To say what the newspapers likely won’t. And to let Abu Namis stand as a representative of so many other unsung Iraqi heros. There are too many to celebrate. And like Abu Namis, many of them pay the price every day.
In the Fall we will begin our first tour of America. We will be talking more about these stories, about Iraqi peacemakers, Muslim peacemakers, and Christians peacemakers; and about how these principles are deeply relevant to your friendships, your marriages, and your engagement with the world around you, and about how you can live a similar life - even when the stakes may not seem as high.
Until then, may GOD do something to amazing and unpredictable to intervene in the current course of events in IRAQ. Peace was GOD’s idea long before it was ours.
Peace from Iraq,
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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. |
Baby Leena Leaves Iraq for Urgent Surgery in Turkey
April 14, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
It was about mid-morning on Sunday when Leena’s dad came into our office, frantically looking for help for his daughter who was dying before his eyes from her congenital heart defect.
We contacted our partners in Istanbul at the Anadolu Medical Center and they concurred: it might be too late for Leena, now 50 days old, but if there was any remaining chance she should come immediately.
With unprecedented speed we worked with Leena’s father and their extended family to get Leena to surgery. The family and friend network rallied quickly sold their car and rallied with a total of $10,000. Within just a few hours we were able to get our local staff, Leena, and her mother on the very last seats out of Iraq on Tuesday’s flight to Istanbul.
The picture above is Leena’s last moments with her father before leaving him to go back to the village where he is 8 year old Mohammed Star’s elementary school teacher, whom we sent to surgery in November 2009.
Are you looking for a way to get involved? Let us suggest the following three actions:
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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. |
Heran Has Infection Around Her Heart 9 Months After Surgery
February 5, 2010 by Ruth · Leave a Comment
Heran had surgery in May 2009 - the first of two surgeries she’ll need to be considered completely healed. Heran is currently sick with an infection in her heart and Dr. Aso, our local pediatric cardiologist in Iraq, has recommended that she stay in hospital for the course of her antibiotic treatment so that she can be closely monitored.
She was disappointed that she doesn’t have a nice hospital room with her own personal TV like she had during her at Anadolu Medical in Turkey. There aren’t any TV’s at all available for her to watch here so we were pleased that we were able to lend her a mini portable DVD player for her stay as it will be 6-7 weeks which is a long time for anyone and a lifetime for a 7-year-old girl. She was very excited about it!
She’s been very brave so far with so many blood tests and having her cannula site changed every few days. I’ve been visiting her every couple of days for countless games of ‘Uno’! She loves that game!
Heran has been sick a lot these past few months, so we’re hoping that after this infection clears up she will be able to be back at school and that her immune system will become stronger. Visiting is limited to just 2 days a week here so both her and her mother are missing the rest of the family plus she’s missing school a lot too.
We’re thankful for special permission to visit her anytime. So we’ll do our best to keep you posted on her progress.
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Ruth Simpson is a Family Advocate for the Preemptive Love Coalition in Iraq and a certified physio-therapist. Ruth also hails from Ireland, though she's slowly losing her amazing accent amongst all the Americans. When not sharing her life with PLC's kids in Iraq, she's most often serving some other constituent group with her rehabilitative skills and compassion. |
Soma Salah Has Passed Away Due to a Blood Clot in Lungs (b. July 24, 2009 - d. January 10, 2010)
January 11, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
It’s with a heavy heart that I write today to say that Baby Soma passed away at 11:45 p.m., Sunday, January 10th, 2010. I had just gotten off the phone with the church in Texas that funded her surgery and given them the update about her serious condition, while thanking them for taking a risk on her surgery. I didn’t know it at the time, but as they finished their lunch in Texas, Soma’s life was on the line in Istanbul.
It was a blood clot in her lungs - something for which the ECMO machine couldn’t compensate. The surgeons left the comfort of their homes and families in the middle of the night to respond but there was nothing to be done.
Last week I said that the Preemptive Love Coalition was not a heart surgery organization, as though chalking up another heart surgery was of some importance. I said we were a HOPE BANK where parents come for hope transfusions - a global family alongside whom Iraqi families could stand in the face of hopelessness, and finally see light at the end of the dark night. And I said that it was for long-term impact that we had decided to take the risk on Soma’s surgery.
So how should we understand our decision today? Did we make the right choice? Did we hasten her death? Was it worth it? Was it a failure? Are we complicit?
Everyone will judge us by their own criterion. Indeed, our own answers and emotions have run the gammut this week. This was a huge surprise for us. We had braced ourselves for long-term loss. We were entirely unprepared for loss in the short-term (even though the doctors had only offered a sobering 65% chance of her surviving ICU).
From an organizational stand point, I owe you an answer as to whether or not we count this as a success or failure so you know what to expect from us in the future.
1. This is a failure. We don’t exist for heart surgeries. We exist to impact the children who are most “impactable” for the long-term. In fact, we turn many children away because their long-term well-being is best served by non-surgical solutions. All other things being equal (and they never are), we would use our limited resources to offer surgery to a child who is most likely to be alive with a healthy heart in sixty years before we help a child who will be hanging on by a thread with a dying heart at twenty. In that sense, we invested our money in a bit of a gamble with Soma because we knew that there were other kids back in Iraq who were more highly “impactable.” It would be easy to argue that we didn’t make it past good intentions this time and that this was an “impact fail.” We welcome that critique. And if that is how you’d like your money invested, we are here to put your money to work. At the same time…
2. This is a success. The Preemptive Love Coalition consistently offers hope, help, and life-saving heart surgeries to children that have been rejected by one or more of the other options available to them. Whether it is a question of resource allocation, ethical priorities, or surgical skill, many of the lives we have successfully saved have been turned down by the government, local, or international groups - including Kadeeja, Heran, and Ahmed . We were - as far as anyone knew - their last chance; their last hope. Soma was one of these.
We spoke seriously with Soma’s parents about the risks. In the end, it was not really the Preemptive Love Coalition who decided to do the surgery. What we did was give them the green light to use our funds and choose for themselves. They chose to risk it and in that limited sense, we gave the family what they asked for - a chance at life. And that chance - that hope - is precisely what they had not found in any other government, hospital, or organization. We told them We love you. You matter to us and to God.. From the hope perspective; from the love perspective, this was not a failure. We chose to love; and love deeply.
3. Still, this is a wake up call. We have asked you a number of times what kind of organization you would have us be. Your overwhelming answer is that you’d like us to be people of the last chance. Some families in Iraq are unnervingly content to sit by and deny their children are dying. We’ve seen it a number of times. It defies all reason. But many more are ready to risk it all for a chance to see their 7 month old learn to crawl, go to school, and marry someday. For those families, you’ve declared your intention to stand by their side. And we have used your financial gifts to fulfill your wishes.
Soma stands as a monument of hope for other Last Chance Children. We don’t have to burry her story with her body for fear that it will reflect negatively on our work; for fear that fewer Iraqi children will be helped because of the “bad press.” To us, this isn’t bad press. This is love in motion.
Jon Foreman sings, “If it doesn’t break your heart it isn’t love.”
This is a wake up call because there are going to be more little babies like Soma that break our hearts. Brace yourselves. If you’re in this for the long haul with us, we can promise you:
- 1. We will give it everything we have and we will give families HOPE and a shot at life.
- 2. We will see more death.
- 3. We will love until we bleed out and have nothing left.
With you,
Jeremy Courtney
Executive Director
jeremy [at] preemptivelove.org
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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. |
“Take My Eyes Just Save My Child” Cries Soma’s Mom On the Way to Surgery
January 8, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
The extended deliberation and explanation about the risks of Soma’s particular surgery was not easy on Soma’s mom - or her dad by telephone back in Iraq. So when it came time to wheel her down to the operating room, emotions were running pretty high and fears were even more piqued than some of the other mothers.
Soma is in surgery right now. More to come in a few hours…
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We can do surgeries like this because hundreds of people every year give generously to cover the material costs of surgery to impact the future of kids in Iraq. |
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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. |
Mohammed’s Mom Waits Anxiously for Fever to Subside; Surgery Delayed until Monday
January 7, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
A fever presented itself today in Mohammed Umed. As a precautionary measure doctors have delayed his surgery to observe and investigate what may be causing the fever. In the interim period, his mother is understandably anxious as she has now sat by while two other kids have had their chance before hers. Of course, they are all in this together, but it’s easy enough to relate to her desire to be “first” and not “last” in a critical scenario like this.
So this Kurdish mother from Iraq waits in Turkey while her husband serves as a soldier in Baghdad and the rest of her family is at home. Together we are all hoping the fever will not prove to be the result of anything serious; hoping that Mohammed’s chance at surgery is not delayed any further.
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Follow Mohammed on Twitter: @MohammedUmed. Subscribe to Mohammed’s updates via RSS HERE. Follow Mohammed’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. |
As Hamma Is Accepted to Surgery We See Chance to Mend Wounds Inflicted By Others
January 6, 2010 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
After a mostly restful day recouping from international travel and the shock of being around yet another group of foreigners, Hamma and his mom were excited to hear that he had been accepted as a strong candidate for surgery in the morning, January 7th.
We say “another group of foreigners” because Hamma’s family were victims of a cruel scheme in which they were robbed of thousands of dollars earlier last year while seeking surgery from a neighboring country. In the end - and this story has been corroborated by a number of close and independent sources - the family was left with a dying child, thousands of dollars stolen from them, and a lot of distrust of foreigners eager to “help” them.
Hopefully we can begin repairing the damage done - on all accounts.
Tomorrow will tell…
Follow Hamma on Twitter: @HammaDana. Subscribe to Hamma’s updates via RSS HERE. Follow Hamma’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. |
Toyota (Yeah, the Auto Maker) Features PLC in Their “Get in Gear” Campaign
October 19, 2009 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
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David Statham visited PLC in Iraq in April 2009 after his wife bought an intriguing shirt that said, “Buy Shoes. Save Lives.” on it. Statham, Technology Manager for Toyota Motor Sales (USA) for his day job, has gone on to raise thousands of dollars and tons of awareness for PLC in Toyota and in his home state of California. Statham also serves on the PLC Advisory Board. |
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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. |
Daryan Salah Has Passed Away (b. March 20, 2009 - d. September 4, 2009)
September 4, 2009 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment
This is the post we hoped we’d never write… but Daryan Salah gave up the fight for his life today at 5:40 a.m. in Istanbul, Turkey after over a month in ICU waiting for his lungs to recover. We spoke with Daryan’s mother and father (and extended family) in our Iraq office this morning and wept bitterly with them over the loss of this dear boy.
Like them, we ourselves are looking for meaning in today’s chaos. The earth is broken. There’s got to be more than “making the world a better place.” We do not need a patch… we need an overhaul…
But maybe HOPE still wins today, because even in Daryan’s death hundreds of you around the world have been drawn in by the story of a little boy who might have otherwise been labeled an “enemy.” And in the devastation we’re all reminded that organizations like ours are powerless to do anything but patchwork repair. Overhaul - indeed re-creation - will have to come from somewhere else.
Daryan, you expanded our hearts’ collective capacity to hope. Rest in peace, little brother.
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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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