It's after hours on a Thursday night, our team receives a message you never want to hear: Emmanuel, a cardiac patient from Nigeria, has suffered a heart attack the night before his flight to India for surgery. He recovers overnight, but is not stable enough to board the flight with his mother. The airline cancels their tickets and Emmanuel now requires a doctor's letter (on a weekend) identifying a 48 hour window in which he is allowed to board another flight. The doctor’s note is acquired, but the cost of a new ticket on such short notice is ruinous. As our team huddles for a solution, discussing timelines and an overshot budget, I open an email from Rebecca, a good friend of Mending Kids, asking if I want an upgrade on my way home from the Tanzania mission using her expiring miles. As much as my back and dreams of comfort scream "yes", my mind turns to Emmanuel. I ask Rebecca if I can accept the miles but instead use them to purchase last-minute tickets to save Emmanuel's life. When Rebecca books Emmanuel’s flight, it all becomes real. She sees his precious face on his passport and the importance of her gift transcends any expectations. Emmanuel has since received life-saving heart surgery and will be returning home today. All this to say how grateful we are to Rebecca and how things worked out. No one donor, foundation, or company funds Mending Kids. We are all part of the mortar that sustains us and makes our mission possible. From this act of unexpected kindness, we are hopeful there may be more friends out there who would like to help us travel another child to their life-saving care.
Is that person you? The next time you travel, please remember that a gift of miles can help us save one more child and become an investment in a lifetime of smiles. Grateful that, together, we are mending kids. Isabelle Fox Executive Director
Do you want to know what heroes look like?
This year’s Mend and Love Honorees Dr. Evan Zahn and Dr. Salvatore Agati are currently in the island nation of Mauritius this week mending hearts and saving the lives of 30+ kids. These efforts are made possible by the support of your donations. A little over two weeks away, our Imagine Gala: The Beat Goes On, hosted by our wonderful Mending Kids Ambassador, Ms. Tia Carerre, will be honoring these two Lifesavers and the La Cañada Junior Women’s Club (for their efforts for the Hometown Missions). The funds raised on April 2 will determine how many more lives we can save and transform in 2022. The world is opening up, we are answering the call to help, please join us in celebrating our heroes, our accomplishments and planting seeds for the future. Together, we are mending kids. Dear friends and Mending Kids Family,
On Tuesday, November 30th, millions of people around the world will come together to support charities on what is known as Giving Tuesday. This year, the Open Hearts Foundation has generously launched a matching challenge of up to $10,000 to our Mending Kids donors in support of our Hometown-Mend U.S. programs and continued contributions of PPE to local frontline heroes assisting the underserved. As you come together to give thanks and consider your end of year donations, please gift what you can manage and know that your contributions will have double the impact! This matching opportunity will allow us to serve more local children patiently awaiting to have their self-esteem restored. By making a gift or joining our monthly giving program, you will provide Mending Kids with the ability to deliver critically needed surgeries to children, consistently. Thank you for keeping our kids in your thoughts and for making their lives matter. Have a very Happy Thanksgiving, From all of us at Mending Kids We are delighted to report that after a long hiatus, our small but mighty Ear-Nose & Throat surgical team was cleared to travel to the Bugando Medical Center in Mwanza, Tanzania a few weeks ago. Thanks to a generous donation of equipment from Storz Medical and supplies from MAP International and Americares, they provided our medical team with long-awaited specialized hands-on airway training and operated on 25 kids in desperate need of care. A special shoutout to Jen's Cafe Bars who supplied bars for the medical team to sustain them during long surgical days. While one team was at work mending kids in Tanzania, another from the Philippine Heart Center in Manila deployed to an underserved part of the country to provide training and cardiac procedures to underserved children whose families could not afford the care, let alone travel to Manila. 18 kids had their lives saved. This week the team is in Marawi City and Cagayan de Oro planning to mend 18 more hearts. Last but not least, 2 children in our Individual surgical care program have received care in the U.S. and in India.
As Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday (November 30) approaches, We are so grateful to all of you who have stood by us. Please keep our kids in your thoughts as you plan your end-of-year giving. Their lives matter. Grateful, we are mending kids. Thank you! We want to express our gratitude and appreciation to all of our fabulous supporters and sponsors who made Hike2Mend a huge success! You came from near and far to honor the journey so many parents take to gain access to medical care for their children, whether on foot or by navigating insurance eligibility. Thank you to our Mending Kids: Bridget (Nigeria), Erick (Honduras), and Taihtzy (Nicaragua) who were on hand to cheer you on, and Josue (pictured below) fresh from his recent procedure who walked to celebrate with us. Check out some memories here.
The journey doesn't have to stop here. You can continue to hike at any time from wherever you live and raise awareness to help our kids get the critical surgical care they so desperately need. Last Saturday 47 surgical and medical volunteers convened at the Memorial Outpatient Surgical Center Long Beach to provide free surgeries to 15 children in one day. After a year of playing whack-a-mole setting missions, rescheduling missions, riding the pandemic rollercoaster, remote work, travel moratoriums, treating individual cases, delivering PPE, hosting symposia, it was no small feat to finally have our 8th Hometown mission date that we could all work toward. And seeing the kids arrive, from all over Southern California (and one from Arizona,) talking to them about the challenges and obstacles they overcame for them to get here. Their families' resilience. Their faith. It all just reminded us and reinforced why we do our Hike 2 Mend every fall. And then, after a long day, waving goodbye to them in the end, knowing that we had restored their self-esteem, was something we could all sigh with relief for. We have between 3 and 4 million kids in this state that are underinsured or uninsured and we are a small nonprofit, so the idea that Mending Kids could someday be a go-to to and help connect a greater fraction of these kids in need through a referral network is a big dream. One that we will have to be strategic and resilient about, building it, managing it, one mission and one child at a time, patiently and resolutely. The big picture is about shining a light on the health disparity that surrounds us; visibly and invisibly and the social injustice that is inextricably enmeshed alongside it. Health frees up resources and energy to focus on learning and for the parent to focus on employment, affording them all the time to elevate their standards of living and reset them on a course to dream of better things. So we are left with two options: We can go to sleep at night beating ourselves up for not mending more kids (several kids were leftover for the next mission) or we can go to sleep at night with some measure of relief knowing that we may not have saved the world, but last Saturday, we helped mend 15 kids’ worlds and for now, that’s going to have to be okay. We will forge ahead, methodically and diligently, to the next Hometown Mission - Mend US and make it happen soon for our next wave of patients. They shouldn't have to wait so long to enjoy their childhoods.
Join us. Together, we are Mending Kids. Isabelle Fox Executive Director |