Congress Clothing is at it again.

Last year they donated a percentage of their profits and gave enough to save a child’s life, and now they’re doing it again!

I sometimes hear people say things like “I wish my work could help people like yours” and I always point them to businesses like Congress. These people saved a life by selling shirts and shoes! Check out their store by visiting here, or why not use your own business to save lives?

Write us and let us dream about it with you!

Kristine is an advocate and activist based in Indiana, and she is responsible for many of the lifesaving operations we’ve provided over the years. Take a few minutes to read her story:

This Sunday will mark my fourth Mother’s Day. I have not held my baby in my arms for any of them.

I was pregnant Mother’s Day 2009. I got cards from my husband and mother, and thought about the next year when I’d wake up to a baby and be a “real mother.” My perception of a real mother was so off. In November, I gave birth to Cora, and she was perfect. Except I didn’t know she was born with a broken heart—congenital heart disease.

She died suddenly and unexpectedly only five days later. The last two Mother’s Days have been spent wishing I could hide from the day’s barrage of images of “perfect families.”

For too many mothers across the globe, Mother’s Day is spent not holding our babies, but visiting their grave stone, or in the hospital willing them to get better.

In Iraq, Mother’s Day for thousands of moms means knowing their child’s heart is a ticking time bomb. With every pump of blood, their child’s heart becomes a little more weakened. Without lifesaving surgery, they will die. It’s a fact, this will be the last Mother’s Day for hundreds of Iraqi mothers to hold their babies.

I won’t ever hold my daughter again. Instead, I throw all of my energy into hoping all moms see their babies become adults.

To the mothers sitting bedside in Iraq, hopelessly watching your child struggle, I’m glad the Preemptive Love Coalition is here. Hope is coming. It won’t come in time for all of you, but it’s coming. I promise to do everything I can to make it come faster, and I hope other moms will join me.

That’s the real meaning of Mother’s Day for me, working to make sure every mother gets to spend the day with her child, in the U.S., in Iraq, and across the world.

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To see how Kristine is making lifesaving, legislative change on behalf of mothers, visit her website: www.KristineBrite.com

We’re only several years late to the Instagram party.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Instagram, it’s a free photo-sharing program that has exploded in popularity over the last couple years.

We love it because the new Facebook integration makes it easier to connect you with the Iraqi children you love. We can snap a photo right there in the hospital—*click*—and put it right in front of you in real-time!

We’ll also use Instagram to show you a side of Iraq that you’ve probably never seen before: weddings, goat-head soup, picnics, and anything else culturally unique that we encounter in our quest to establish surgical centers and save lives here in this great country. See our photos by connecting with us on Facebook or by searching our username in Instagram: preemptivelove.

And if all this integration-program-real-time gobbledygook has you confused, just keep reading. The strip below is from The Oatmeal, and it explains recent Instagram news well:

Friends, Hussain’s surgery has been post-poned. That’s the sad news. Our lead surgeon’s foot is injured, and he needs surgery and rest. As discouraging as this is, it’s for the best because it will allow our surgeon to fully heal and then provide Hussain with even better treatment.

Now for the good news: Our goal for Hussain is 75% complete—we just lack $1,000!

Will you help Hussain make it to the finish line by donating toward his surgery? If just a handful of you give $10 and $15 gifts, he’ll be there. And anything you give beyond that goal will go toward helping other children at the next Remedy Mission.

It’s discouraging that something as small as a foot injury can keep Hussain and his friends from surgery, but we believe Hussain is worth the wait. Please continue to pray for Hussain and to wait for his healing with us.

Most organizations put a premium on celebrating successes at the end of every year—we certainly do!

But we also believe that we have a great deal to learn from our failures, so we endeavor to share them and the lessons we’ve learned in hopes of avoiding those same mistakes in the future.

When seeking to tackle intractable problems in an environment like Iraq, missed opportunities, missteps, false starts, and failures are par-for-the-course. There will be no improvement in the political situation in Iraq, in the economy, in healthcare, or in the pursuit of peace without a number of flops and failures along the journey. If we already knew what worked, we all would’ve implemented it by now and moved on.

The truth is, neither the American government nor the Iraqi—neither international nor local NGOs—truly know what works in Iraq. Most of us are making educated guesses and seeking to rightly adapt programs and principles that have proven successful at other times in Iraq or in other parts of the world.

From this point forward, I want to provide you with an annual (and sometimes real-time) assessment of our failures. In absence of such previous reports, I will use a few minutes to highlight our most meaningful setbacks, failures and lessons learned to date.

The three major failures of 2011, to be covered in this report are:

Let’s get started…

Failure #1: Leadership Indecisiveness on the Case of Six-Year-old Yahya

This was a major lesson in leadership that potentially affects every area of our organizational and team life, couched in the saga of one very specific family.

I was walking home from work one night in Iraq in early 2010, when my phone rang. On the other end of the line was a man, knocking on the door back at my office, in hopes of meeting me and presenting the case of his nephew, Yahya, to me for surgical consideration. 

I asked if we could meet tomorrow, but he was insistent and there seemed to be great urgency in his voice. Instead of postponing the meeting, I gave him directions to my home and met with him over tea.

From early on, the situation was less than ideal. Yahya had already received one charitable heart surgery and the second one that was being requested was bound to be difficult.

In our 2007-2010 Failure Report, I noted our decision to restrict the complexity of children we sent abroad for surgery after a series of deaths caused us to reconsider our risk tolerance. Yahya was definitely on the high end of our new risk tolerance.

I chose to refuse surgery to the family based on our new priorities.

Months later, after a new check-up, Yahya’s mother and father brought him into our office to inquire again about the possibility of surgery. I’ll never forget sitting with them in my office explaining our decision to decline surgery funding for Yahya.

Then, with all the persistence that you would expect from a mother, she appealed to me again not to turn away their little boy.

I think one thing that non-profit directors and program directors fail to say often enough is this: “I am a human. I’m swayed by the kindness or brashness of our patients and, at times, it heavily influences how I make selection decisions.”

I could not continue to say “no” any longer. I said “yes” (with conditions).

Our surgeon in Istanbul was clear from the beginning that his surgery would require a “valved conduit” (an additional $5,000 expense or more) and licensing agreements in Turkey at the time had caused a shortage of such devices.

Cody Fisher (Development Director) did a great job reaching an agreement with Medtronic providing Yahya with a donated conduit, but the timing of receiving the conduit was still beholden to the licensing agreements that were being worked out in Istanbul.

All these factors together ultimately led to Yahya missing our July 2010 surgery group to Istanbul. We refunded the family’s portion of the money they had contributed for his surgery.

Shortly thereafter, in August 2010, we conducted our first Remedy Mission inside Iraq—our new programatic focus on localized training and development. The mission was such a huge success, I became convinced that we needed to cease all funding for outside surgeries and focus solely on development work inside the country.

But I also felt a sense of commitment to Yahya and his family, who were basically caught in the transitional period between one programatic focus and another.

What I should have done at that point was send Yahya to surgery in Turkey, finish our commitments there, take the free valved conduit from Medtronic, and finish our work in Turkey strongly. What I did instead was place Yahya on an upcoming Remedy Mission and take the Turkey option off the table for the family.

What I didn’t account for very well in that decision was how the complexity of Yahya’s case would fare in a development setting; a setting in which local capacity was far below that which he would have received in Istanbul.

In the chaos of Remedy Mission IV, a number of things went badly. Among them, Yahya’s family probably did not receive the proper explanations that they should have about the risks of his surgery and they probably felt very vulnerable about the decision to go forward with the risky surgery or forever miss their opportunity.

It was difficult to assess all this in real time, in part because I was so hopeful for Yahya and his family. In my optimism, I did not see or recognize a few red flags. But even that is not the whole truth… I remember hesitations—“red flags”—even as I sit here today. I willingly suppressed anything that was not hopeful and optimistic. It seemed noble, brave and right.

But he wasn’t my child.

Yahya’s surgery presented many complications that ultimately required doctors to operate through the night. When Yahya arrived in ICU around 5 or 6 a.m. the next morning, he was deemed stable enough for the surgical team to go to the hotel for a few hours of sleep. Before their bus even arrived at the hotel, though, Yahya had passed away in ICU.

I would not normally include a single death in a year-end Failure Report. My point is not that I feel bad and need catharsis. It’s just that Yahya was different, and not only because he had a name or because his family hosted us for dessert in their home and shared tea in mine. No, Yahya was different because I flipped-flopped on the family so many times. I said “no.” Then “yes.” Then “no” again. And then “yes.” And then he died.

Organizationally, the failure was related to a lesson we were just beginning to identify in our 2007-10 Failure Report: we are not the best qualified to select children for surgery. The suggested way forward at that time is still right: we have handed child selection over to a committee of local healthcare providers and our international surgical team. There will still be deaths that we regret deeply, but they will be less a function of our role and influence in the child selection process.

Personally, the failure was related to my inability to make a decision and stick with it. I always had a bad feeling about Yahya’s likelihood to endure surgery. That was why I denied funding more than a year prior to his death. I had good reason to deny funding. But I went back on my hunch. Fair enough… I wanted to give a family a chance. But I never really got over my fears of his death and that made me unwilling to go all in with the family. I hedged over spending extra money on his expensive valved conduit. And even when the conduit was donated, I found other reasons to delay surgery for fear of spending a lot of money (including the family’s) on a surgery about which I was always suspicious.

Lessons Learned: 


1. It’s OK to change one’s mind; but a leadership “Yes” or “No” should mean something. It hurts everyone involved to say one thing, give the impression of support, and never fully get behind one’s own decision. In this case, it played a role in Yahya’s death. 

He may have died in Istanbul just the same. The death itself is not the failure here. The faulty, character-flawed process by which I made life-altering decisions is.

I said “no.” I should have stood my ground. Or I said “yes” and I should have given that family my fullest “yes” ever. Instead, I said “yes” and stayed on the fence. I won’t do that again.

2. We are not qualified to select children. We are too emotionally attached and we do not possess the knowledge to make a right decision about a patient’s candidacy for surgery. We have handed child selection over to a collaboration between local cardiologists and our international surgical teams.

If you have any questions or concerns about this report, the decisions we’ve made, or the direction we are going, please email me at your convenience. I would love to hear from you.

Have you picked up on how much Hussain enjoys playing around yet? This was a short video clip from the first time I met this boy.

To track his progress and to interact with Hussain online, check out Hussain’s party page. You can leave him a note and we’ll show it to him once we’re in the hospital! Make a short video, craft a poster, or get the kids together to color Hussain with a new heart. Click here to connect with him now!

Former short-term staff member Lydia O’Neil just released her documentary from her time in Kurdistan! In it, she takes a behind-the-scenes look at what Kurdish girls really think about boys, family-expectations, and shame. Check it out!

Over the last few months we’ve seen an incredible influx of new readers and supporters, so it seemed good to put our most informative and successful video to-date back on the blog.

Whether you’re brand new or if you’ve been here a hundred times, watch it and let me know your reaction. Is it naive? Spot-on? Over-the-top? Email me!

I’m sure this has never happened to you, but today I got distracted at work…

I blame the internet (read: Twitter) for being so interesting. But at least it was a semi-productive kind of distracted; I started reading back through some of the very first posts on this blog, written by Jeremy way back in the day.

This was back when we still emphasized our Buy Shoes. Save Lives. program, and Jeremy ended a few of the emails with quirky phrases like “shod thyself” and signed off with some pretty epic monikers like “the rad-ifier” (someone who makes things rad, obviously) and “the wristbandits,” just to name a couple.

But all this rabbit-trailing was a great reminder of PLC’s history and what you have made possible! Some of you have faithfully read this blog for years. You’ve been with us through serious tragedy, and sky-high elation. You stuck with us when we failed (and wrote about it in-detail) and when we transitioned to our current Remedy Mission model.

You rooted us on back when this was all just a big, beautiful mess-of-an-idea. You believed in us, and I hope you know how grateful we are for it.

PLC turned 4 years-old last February, and that quick look back at our history reminded me how much further we have to go. By the end of the year we’ll be developing heart centers in 5 cities across the country—great news, right!? But the key word there is ‘developing,’ because these centers will likely take 5-8 years before they’re fully independent and self-sustaining.

So we need you to stick with us, to keep reading, and to remember that this won’t happen without you. Countless thousands of children are still waiting, and countless thousands will be saved if we can just keep moving and looking forward together.

With you to the end,

The Rad-ifier

I spent several afternoons playing with Hussain while he was waiting to have his diagnostic tests run, and let me tell you, this kid loves to play. Hussain was easily the most fun person to be around at the hospital, and all the time we spent together made me even more excited to stay in touch with him and his family while they wait for surgery. Here are some of the recent questions we asked Hussain’s dad:

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We’re just a few weeks away from Remedy Mission X, and we’re hoping to provide Hussain with a long-awaited surgery—check out his page HERE to learn how you can help. We’ll also be sharing his progress on our recently-updated Facebook page.

Stick with us…more to come.