Proud and Passionate About This One

What things break your heart?

the hundreds of millions orphans in the world? the thousands of children in foster care in our own country? the millions in inhumane refugee camps? the thousands of child soldiers? the girls and women caught in sex trafficking and prostitution? poverty? starvation? homelessness? health care?

I guess you could boil it down to one word: injustice. It's injustice toward any soul that gets to us.

Although all injustice should break all of our hearts completely, that just isn't the case, is it? We're created to be different; we're all at different places on our journey; and frankly in our own "bubbles" of life we don't know about all of the injustices out there - if many at all. We may be passionate about a particular cause or several - and like me, maybe you are sometimes bent toward one thing for a while, then later another. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. In fact, that's likely being sensitive to the different whispers and nudgings as the Spirit leads you, which is exactly the way we need to be.

With that said, I'd love to share with you about an injustice that has touched me deeply, something I discovered through a personal connection - through a dear friend and her team who formed an organization I believe is making a HUGE impact in the realm of healing and reconciliation. Most importantly, they are doing it WELL!

The injustice.

Please bear with me and read this paragraph.

There are over 30,000 children in Iraq currently with life-threatening heart defects, with approximately 9,500 more newborns diagnosed each year. Chemical attacks and "experiments" by Saddam Hussein on the Kurds of northern Iraq in the 1980s, coupled with Depleted Uranium weapons used during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s have contributed to what is likely a lingering chemically-toxic legacy in the soil and genetics of the Iraqi people. (Important sidenote: DU is still being used in war today, and is also affecting British and US troops. A google search will reveal the intense controversy surround it's use.) Additionally, UN sanctions against Iraq (which failed to harm Saddam as intended) and related widespread corruption withheld essential human services from the Iraqi people causing rampant malnutrition and disease in Iraq during the last couple of decades. Those factors, along with culturally-driven intrafamily marriages, have contributed to these high percentages of heart defects, and impacted the health of this generation of Iraqi children,and possibly more to come. Yet few Iraqi doctors are trained or able to perform the needed surgeries, and many doctors have left Iraq for safer more lucrative locations. So Iraqi families place their terminally ill children on long lists and go to great measures to leave the country for the surgeries, most times to no avail.

The organization.

But hope has arrived in Iraq through Preemptive Love Coalition, an organization which serves these families and children affected by life-threatening heart defects. When I say serve, I mean they love and care for these families- through meaningful personal relationships and multiple needed resources.

Preemptive Love Coalition exists to eradicate the backlog of thousands of children in Iraq waiting in line for life-saving surgery in pursuit of peace between communities at odds.

And they do it with integrity. They do it by coming alongside these families and treating them with deep respect and understanding. They value these families, their culture, and their love for their children. They facilitate the training of Iraqi doctors in the life-saving methods of heart surgeries, so that one day their organization will not be needed. They follow up with the patients and their families, getting them the care and recovery resources they need. They do all this with transparency and humility. They do it with excellence and with a purposeful plan. When you take a look at PLC's core values (my favorite page of their website) these qualities are evident, and stand out as ones every humanitarian organization should have.

PLC has brought forth hope where there has been very little.

The impact.

PLC's Remedy Missions are their vehicle for high impact change. During Remedy Missions, international pediatric heart surgery teams are brought into Iraq to perform surgeries on 20+ children and train a team of Iraqi doctors and nurses in the span of just two weeks. Remedy Missions drastically reduce the cost of saving a life per child and reduce per hour training costs for Iraqi medical staff. They plan to train 4-6 heart surgery teams across the country for the next 5-7 years. Remedy Missions are also peace missions. American surgeons bring a non-combat story of Iraq back to their home communities, while Iraqis experience love and service from westerners without the trappings of politics and government. PLC invests heavily in reconciliation and peace this way.

It's not often that I find an organization I like to "shout from the rooftops" about. But there's something about this one that brings to mind words like "excellence" and "integrity" and "impactful." If you've ever wanted to make a difference in reconciling an injustice, following the example of this organization would serve you well. And if you ever wanted to give to a worthy cause and know that your money was being well-spent, this is definitely one of those organizations.

Please visit their website! You'll especially LOVE their blog! Please read more about what is going on in Iraq. Enjoy the pictures of the precious children whose lives are being saved. And when you hear someone wondering if Iraq is changing for the better, you can list these three signs for them with certainty: Iraq IS changing for the better, due in part to the amazing work of Preemptive Love Coalition.

[The following is an excerpt from a PLC blog entry by Cody Fisher]

"Sign #1: Right now, families are traveling from all over southern Iraq to come to this Remedy Mission. Before, families were lining up to leave the country trying to find the doctors that could save their children from their heart defects. Today, families are lining up outside a hospital in southern Iraq, waiting for their child’s chance at a lifesaving heart surgery. For the first time, families don’t need to leave the country to find the cure.

Sign #2: This week, a Sunni family will hand their child over to a Shiite doctor to be saved. In 2007, at the height of the violence in Iraq between Sunni and Shiites, this would have been unheard of. Now, the disease that’s threatening their children is bringing them together!

Sign #3: The notorious “brain drain” that happened when 20,000 of the 34,000 registered doctors in Iraq fled during the war is being reversed. During our last Remedy Mission in northern Iraq we met one of the doctors who had returned. Today we’re not only seeing doctors return, but – thanks to Remedy Missions – the doctors who never left are being equipped and trained, too. Their training is changing the tide of healthcare in Iraq."