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)

Tragedy To Triumph—How Preemptive Love Shocked A City

March 8, 2012 by matt · Leave a Comment 

A week ago today our friend Jeremiah Small was killed in his classroom. His own student pulled a gun on him. If you haven’t read about it, see more here.

It happened here in our home city of Sulaymaniyah, and the entire community is still recovering from the shock of it all. Of course, the shock is about the violent death of an American in the oft-touted “the other Iraq” region of Kurdistan, to be sure, but the shock is also about much more than that.

When people in Sulaymaniyah heard that Small’s family was coming to Kurdistan to bury their son, rumors started to fly. Some thought they were coming for financial compensation, others for revenge. And in an eye-for-an-eye culture like this one, rumors like that aren’t crazy. If someone hurts you, you hurt them back. And that’s more than cultural, it’s human nature.

But that isn’t preemptive love.

Until someone is willing to absorb the pain rather than pass it on, violence will only continue to beget violence. Pain has to go somewhere.

So when Jeremiah’s family arrived and began blessing everyone they met, people were amazed! They were grief-stricken, to be sure, but through their great love the Small family proved to be bigger than anything most people had ever seen—they blessed rather than cursed, they sang rather than screamed; their love was furious. They even wore traditional Kurdish clothing in order to show solidarity with the culture.

This was their way of living out preemptive love. Just as Jeremiah worked to love his students first—no questions asked—his family came and loved Kurds preemptively. They were remaking a broken world by choosing to forgive rather than to yield to the endless downward spiral of hate and violence.

Perhaps the most compelling example of this love was at the funeral when both the family of Jeremiah and the family of the boy who killed him embraced (pictured above). They absorbed the pain—shared it even—rather than lashing out at each other.

This is preemptive love. This is the lifestyle we believe everyone can (and should) live by. This is the better way, and the Small family used Jeremiah’s death to show us that.

Grab Your Backpack, Let’s Go—Zahraa Is Leaving The ICU!

February 20, 2012 by matt · Leave a Comment 

Good news! Zahraa (AKA the girl in the red coat) made it through surgery and is now in the ICU resting up.

In an effort to cheer her up, the ICU nurses gave her Dora the Explorer stickers and have been singing the theme song with her. It was a sweet moment, but now I can’t get that song out of my head!

Zahraa’s operation went so well that they are releasing her from the ICU soon. She will then spend a day or two in the ward, and after that she goes home!

I plan to visit the family’s hospital room after Zahraa is released, so come back tomorrow to hear more about this precious little girl and her trek toward recovery.

Come on, vamanos!

“His Surgery Would Be Five Years Away”—A Father Shares His Story!

February 15, 2012 by matt · Leave a Comment 

Doctors assigned little Nassir a number—119—and then told him to get in line.

“Should I get a hotel near the hospital for a few days?” his father asked. “No, come back in 5 or 6 years.” So Nassir’s father went home dejected with nothing to do but wait. But waiting could render Nassir inoperable, and then it would be too late.

But, thanks to you, Nassir and his family are getting another chance. Click here to listen to a father tell of his search for a surgery.

No More Crying—Hamma Is Going Home!

February 12, 2012 by matt · Leave a Comment 

I was a little worried when Hamma had to be carried from the ICU into the children’s ward. But the doctors said he is doing well and should be able to go home in a few hours. Then, sure enough, he perked up and now he’s walking all over the place!

After a sick heart, a smashed nose, and a surgery, I finally got what seems to be a smile out of this little boy. Isn’t he cute?

And he has reason to smile! His surgery was a complete success, and he is going home. Thank you for making Hamma’s surgery possible, and thank you for putting his best days ahead of him!

Hamma Is In Surgery!

February 11, 2012 by matt · Leave a Comment 

Remember super-sad-faced Hamma?! He’s getting surgery now!

I spent much of the day running in and out of the operating room to check on him. His father kept poking his head in from the hallway and whispering, “Psst! Mister! Photo Hamma?”

I felt like an image delivery boy with all the running back-and-forth, but letting Hamma’s dad ‘watch’ his son’s progress through surgery was extremely rewarding—at one point he even side-hugged me!

Here are a few of the photos I showed dad throughout the day:

(The boy isn’t alone here, the nurse just stepped away from the window)

As you can imagine, each picture I showed them brought on strong emotions, and by the end of the day his parent’s eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep and crying. But the doctors report that the surgery is going well.

More to come…

Seatbelts Fastened & Tray Tables Upright—Remedy Mission IX Is Here!

February 9, 2012 by matt · Leave a Comment 

Remedy Mission IX is here!

This is our first surgical mission in the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq, and the excitement is electric! The local doctors can’t imagine the extraordinary operations they’re about to see, and families can’t imagine the hope they’re about to find.

And you made that possible! You chipped in, you told your friends, you skateboarded, you ran marathons, and so much more, and now we’re flying south to embody that good will.

Here we go…

VIDEO: Watch Jeremy Courtney Speak At TEDxBaghdad!

February 1, 2012 by matt · Leave a Comment 

Iraq’s first-ever TEDx event happened in Baghdad and, as the only westerner to attend TEDxBaghdad’s inaugural conference, it was an honor for us to have Jeremy attend as a speaker.

Jeremy spoke on the concept of ‘preemptive love’ and its ability to heal, reconcile and restore people to right relationship with one another. If you’re having trouble loading the video above, just click here.

On Vision: Defining The “What” Before The “How”

January 30, 2012 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment 

Note: This is the second of a three-part series on defining and achieving Vision. Click here to read the first part of this series.

I was sitting in an Iraqi hotel lobby in 2007 when one of the hotel staff who was serving me tea approached me and asked: “Can you help my cousin? His daughter was born with a hole in her heart, and no one in all of Iraq can help her. Please, can you help?”

I had just moved to Iraq with my family to work with a different NGO. I didn’t know anything about heart surgery for children or anything about taking children to other countries for treatment.

From the beginning, helping this little girl seemed impossible. And she wasn’t the first child I’d met in Iraq with a life-threatening heart defect. In fact, it seemed like almost everyone knew someone with a child who was born with a messed up heart.

My work with the organization I was with was not capturing my heart. It seemed to lack both vision and impact. And, in any case, it was not set up with an exit strategy—there was no developmental finish line.

Around the same time, Cody Fisher began telling me of his NGO work with many of these children in need whose files were piling up on his friend’s desk as she sought to find them heart surgeries outside the country. The more I inquired, the more intrigued I became.

I learned that there were seven hundred children within a two hour drive of our city who were waiting in line for lifesaving heart surgery. You would never find a backlog that large anywhere in America!

Over the course of this journey, my wife, Cody Fisher, Michelle (then Bailey) Fisher and I chaffed under the tyranny of life as we knew it in Iraq.

After all, it seemed that many of these heart defects were not simply occurring naturally but were probably directly attributable to acts of war—both martial and economic. This was an issue of justice. As Americans, we felt directly responsible for some of this. But it was primarily as Christians that we decided to jump into the unknown and commit ourselves indefinitely to the cause.

Defining the cause itself could have taken us a number of different directions. I am grateful to God that we got this one right amidst all the unknowns: we defined the what before the how.

Would we create an organization primarily because Jeremy had met a little girl in a hotel lobby? No. Would we create an organization primarily because Cody had a few connections to get us off the ground quickly? No.

From the very beginning we established a vision that was far more grand than anything else in cardiac care nationwide.

“… to eradicate the backlog of Iraqi children waiting in line for lifesaving heart surgeries.”

Looking back, it was ludicrous. It was naive. But it was never a mere “dream.” It was a vision. (See my last post on my differentiation between a dream and a vision). There was a moral conviction behind it. It would never be enough for us to simply help the children who crossed our path. It would never be enough to clear the files or the “backlog” on our desk. We had to exist for all the children of Iraq who were waiting in line for lifesaving heart surgery.

Months after articulating our vision for a Backlog-free Iraq, I learned that the leading expert in the region had actually dumbed down the number of children waiting for surgery because he did not want to scare us off. The number was actually 5X greater—closer to four thousand children. We were still waiting on estimates from the rest of the country.

We started to suspect ten thousand children or more were waiting for surgery. And we were not smart enough at that time to really question how many new children were born into the country each year in need of heart surgery.

We were almost immediately faced with a crisis. Our 20-child per year pace was never going to “eradicate the backlog.” Our methodology—the how—could never see our vision realized.

Do we change our vision to meet our methods, or must we change our methods to meet our vision?

Nothing had changed in our desire to see Iraq free of a burdensome backlog. We had established our vision—our what—before we had a clear idea how we were going to bring it about. So we stuck with our vision and forced our methods to catch up.

We redoubled our commitment to eradicate the backlog. We personified “The Backlog”—for he was a devilish foe who needed to be vanquished by all the heroes like you who would partner with us in the coming years. The Backlog only existed because of injustice—both local and internationally imposed. To defeat The Backlog would be more than a triumph of our organization; it would be a victory for every family across Iraq, because every family across Iraq is susceptible to congenital heart disease, the number one birth defect in Iraq and in the world.

Our vision was still maturing, to be sure, but we got this one thing right: we established the what before the how.

There are other organizations that work into Iraq in an effort to help children with heart disease. But sometimes I wonder if the how has taken precedence over the what. Candid conversations often reveal a complete absence of vision; a settling for the methodology of today for lack of a compelling picture of the future.

Since our inception in 2007, we have made four major programatic (methodological) changes in an effort to stay the course and eradicate The Backlog. Every one of them was scary. Every one of them could have been a colossal failure. But vision demands innovation and risk.

Do you have a hard time accepting the world as it is? Do you feel morally compelled to work for a different future? Do you have a vision that you are currently nurturing or pursuing? If so, do yourself a favor: define the what before the how. Methods change with technology, culture and economics. Don’t focus on the how. Get your sweeping vision right by defining the destination point at which you want to arrive. Let the how work itself out one step at a time and don’t sacrifice your “what” for a method that leads you astray.

Can I be a helpful ear as as you try to work out your vision? Don’t hesitate to send me an email by clicking this link!

Do You Have Dreams, Or Do You Have Vision?

January 27, 2012 by Jeremy · Leave a Comment 

I have a hard time accepting things as they are. I’m more of a “how they should be” kind of guy. I’d rather vacation in Iraq, Yemen or Libya than Paris, London or Tokyo. I see discrepancies and obsess over them. My team says I’m “persnickety”—I prefer to think of myself as “particular” or “exacting.” To-may-to, to-mah-to.

In any case, I operate daily according to a vision of the future that is not yet reality.

I prefer the word “vision” to the word “dream” because dreams are so often associated with “dreaming”, “dreamy” and “dreamers.” “Dream” has connotations of other-worldliness. Apart from Martin Luther King’s wonderful speech, most “I have a dream” talk that I’ve encountered reeks of non-action, an assumption that dreaming alone is enough to spark the desired change.

Think of the spate of status updates and tweets on New Year’s Eve in which people dreamed (and invoked Dreaming’s close cousins, “Hope” and “Wish”) for world peace, an eradication of poverty, and global sing-alongs. At the risk of sounding cynical, much of our dreaming is just socially conscious enough to sound engaged and just vague enough to require zero effort of our own.

Therefore, I prefer to have vision over dreams. In the way I use the word, vision requires much of me. I work on vision. I plan for vision. I submit my vision to the critique of others so that it will be refined and strengthened. I seek partnerships to bring the vision into reality. And I pray while waiting for the correct timing to pursue vision.

This post marks the launch of a series on vision – how to define it, nurture it, pursue it and succeed in it. Ultimately I want to encourage others out there who have a hard time accepting things as they are. I want to ignite more passion in the hearts of those of you who insist on returning things to how they should be.

In the process, you will get a clearer picture of what it has required for us to get to this point as an organization. I will be honest about our failures and I will paint a picture of a future Iraq—and a future world—that I hope you will find compelling and inspiring.

We are not just out here in Iraq cranking out heart surgeries. There is a much more sweeping vision, and I feel I’ve failed to bring that to the fore regularly enough.

As you read, if there is anything you feel you’d like to ask or any way in which I might spur you on in your vision, don’t hesitate to send me an email by clicking this link.

Ali Calls His Dad To Tell Him He Is Getting His Heart Fixed Tomorrow!

January 17, 2012 by Cody · Leave a Comment 

Ali’s days in the hospital got a whole lot more exciting once the doctors told him that tomorrow’s his turn to get his heart fixed!

What’s the first thing he did when he heard that? He grabbed the phone and called Dad.

Ali is just hours away from getting his heart mended—get ready!

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