Preemptive Love Coalition—Remaking Iraq Through Healing
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We call it The Backlog—the bottleneck of Iraqi children in need of lifesaving heart surgery. Their lives depend on heart surgeries that Iraq is unable to provide. So we live in Iraq, saving children and equipping Iraqi medical teams so they can be the remedy.
The loss of a child’s life is one of the most tragic things in the world. To see the heartbreak and despair of a family who has lost their precious child is almost too much to bear. But the worst thing is when we realize action could have been taken to heal these children.
Congenital Heart Defects (CHD) are a real problem in Iraq with too many children dying every year from these life-threatening defects. There are several factors at work that have allegedly caused this inflated number of defects. Saddam Hussain used chemical weaponry on his enemies that caused gene-mutating harm to the local people and their unborn children. More recently, American munitions tipped with depleted uranium heavily contaminated the environments of major cities like Fallujah and Basra, causing untold damage. Iraq also experienced decades of brain drain, during which the country’s best and brightest doctors were either assassinated or fled the country. This left Iraqi hospitals unable to cope with the influx of needy children born each year.
Today, there isn’t a single doctor in Iraq capable of performing all of these lifesaving surgeries. The vision of Preemptive Love Coalition is a future where all Iraqi children have access to the lifesaving surgeries they need. PLC began in 2007 when a group of Americans decided something had to be done about the growing CHD backlog. The team was approached by friends and strangers alike with the same question: “Please, can you help my child?” Instead of the knee-jerk “no,” they began researching solutions, and they sent their first child out of the country to surgery in 2007. But exporting the problem to other fully-functioning hospitals is like constantly taking painkillers when you need a root canal; it doesn’t offer the long-term development that Iraqi families need.
Fast-forward to today, and PLC is facilitating an Iraq-wide development initiative that will empower local hospitals to eradicate The Backlog of children waiting in line for heart surgery. PLC’s solution to the ballooning backlog of children and the lack of competent surgeons are called “Remedy Missions:” two-week surgical training missions that allow medical professionals to develop their skills while saving the lives of dozens of children. This training allows local doctors and nurses to continue to heal children long after the Remedy Mission has ended.
By creating a local solution, PLC is exponentially increasing the lives saved as a the result of a Remedy Mission; they are working themselves out of a job. Over 45 weeks of lifesaving operations, over 75,000 hours of training, and over 400 children saved — PLC is working towards accomplishing all of these things by the end of 2012. PLC dreams of a day when Iraqis can care for their own children in peace, when every child born in Iraq has ready access to a lifesaving heart surgery, and when The Backlog is just a distant memory.
More About This Charity
Region
South
Category
Health and Well Being
Name
Preemptive Love Coalition
Mission
Lifesaving heart surgeries for Iraqi children in pursuit of peace between communities at odds.
Impact
- This Charity has raised $481,548 in the past year.
- This Achievement has helped 500 people.
- This Charity has provided over 200 lifesaving heart surgeries
- This Charity has provided 40,000 hours of lifesaving training
Works In
Iraq
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