When I agreed to be part of the Iraq team, I did not actually realize what I was in for. Fallujah was not part of the original plan. We actually teased Dr Kirk that he got us all to say yes and then told us we were going to Fallujah after the fact. The order of events is true, but even he didn't know that we would end up there. The entire trip was supposed to be spent in Dohuk (northern Iraq). He had been there many times with teams doing screenings and heart caths, but this was going to be my first time there. A few weeks before we were set to leave, Dr Kirk found out that it had been approved for our team to go the the hospital in Fallujah. All of the political obstacles to visas and approval were thought to be insurmountable in such a short time, but God opened all the doors and it was apparent that was where we were supposed to go.
When we were on our last flight from Istanbul to Baghdad, I had a very eye opening conversation with the guy sitting next to me. I'm sure he was pretty shocked to see an American girl flying to Baghdad and asked why I was going there. I explained to him what our team was doing, and throughout the course of conversation found out a little bit of his story too. He is 27 and grew up in Baghdad. He was returning home after going to Istanbul to see a specialist. He had minimal feeling and movement in one of his legs because of shrapnel from a car bomb. The specialist he saw told him there was no hope for recovery for his leg. It had been about a year and a half. Once he got home he would be pretty much confined to his house living with his parents. His mom had been in the car with him when the bomb went off, as well as his sister and a friend. His sister lost her life that day. As I sat listening to his story, the reality of where I was going hit me. For people in both Baghdad and Fallujah, like other war-torn areas, most of their lives have been filled with war, death, injury, and uncertainty. On top of that, no one wants to go help them because of the danger. So many times other Iraqis would say to us, "You went to Fallujah? We would never go there!" Even their fellow countrymen are afraid to go to certain cities.
I love that I can be part of a team of people who are willing to go despite danger or fear. What a great privilege it was to work with the doctors and medical staff at the hospital there. They were extremely welcoming and took very good care of us. We didn't go anywhere without our own personal armed security team, and mostly we just didn't go anywhere. We only took 2 trips outside the hospital compound, other than to the airport. They did everything in their power to keep us safe. Ultimately God was definitely watching over us and brought us home safely.
It was also a successful trip from a medical standpoint. Our team worked with cardiologists from Fallujah, Kirkuk, and Tikrit, as well as a cath lab team from Baghdad, and completed 12 heart catheterizations in 4 days. All of the children came through their procedures well with good results. Some of them had devices placed to close defective openings, some had narrow areas widened with balloons, and others were diagnostic caths to determine if they were eligible to have surgery to correct their heart defect. Before we ever left, they wanted to know when we could come back. Their cardiac center is brand new, and the week we were there was the first time that any heart catheterization procedures had ever been done. There were a lot of firsts for them. Hopefully we can go and work with them again in the future so that they can help even more Iraqi children.
Here is the link to some of the pictures from Fallujah.
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