Deaf Iraqi girl brought to U.S. for treatment

[conradd]

Three-year-old Amina can't hear the bombs and bullets that rake through Baghdad. The Iraqi girl has been deaf since birth. Her family is too poor to pay for advanced surgeries that could restore her hearing, so until recently a soundless life seemed certain.

So, the International Kids Fund raised $40K for a cochlear implant and is bringing Amina and her father, Mohammed, here for treatment:

The journey from Baghdad to the United States began with an e-mail. A friend of Amina's father in Iraq contacted a friend in the U.S. Eventually, an e-mail reached Col. Warner Anderson, an Army special forces doctor. Anderson had been in Iraq in 2003 with the 352nd Civil Affairs Command and had made a lot of contacts. While back in the U.S., he started making telephone calls and his wife, Ruth Macias de Anderson, a registered nurse, sent an e-mail to a doctor whom she once worked with in New Mexico.

Dr. Thomas Balkany is now at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine and is chairman of the otolaryngology department that specializes in cochlear implants. He agreed to do the surgery. "We fully expect her to live a normal life once she goes back to Iraq," Balkany said Friday. "In the midst of all this horrible killing that's going on, (Anderson) and his colleagues have taken time to care about one little deaf girl."


Anderson said it was an easy decision. "On my end, it was pretty simple. First we had to find out how to go about doing this," Anderson said in a telephone interview from Fort Bragg, N.C. "My approach was we needed a diagnosis first, so I arranged for her to go to an Army hospital in the Green Zone over there."


. . .


Mohammed, 30, a Baghdad painter, said through an interpreter that he began to see hope "that we might be able to get some help here in the United States." He said his friend reached out to the U.S. military because " I noticed reaction to my daughter there, that the Americans like children and they like to help them, and they like to provide for their health and safety."

[hadassahchana[$]]

What a wonderful story! I hope her surgery goes well.

[amykhar]

Whenever I see these kinds of stories, I can't help but think it would be better to bring a local doctor over too and get him/her trained in the techniques. Then, more than one child could be helped.

[drmomentum[$]]

When M was first undergoing treatment for her disease, a friend of mine had a daughter who had a rare combination of heart abnormalities. We were lucky to be able to spend some time visiting little H at Boston Children's during her brief life because we were there a lot for M's tests.

One of the things that impressed me were the pictures that the children who visited the pediactric cardiac unit had drawn, and which were hanging all over the place. And the families that were there with their young ones. These folks were from all over the world. Many of them were from Arab countries. It was really nice to see the drawings of all the children together like that.

-JP