Healers in apathy zone

A couple of months after Captain Jonathan Heavey, a physician with Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, arrived in Baghdad, an Iraqi doctor handed him the medical file of a 2-year-old boy with a life-threatening heart ailment.The doctor said the boy couldn't get the care he needed in Iraq.

Heavey decided to help. He e-mailed a former colleague at the University of Virginia, who agreed to treat the boy for free.

Then Heavey began the many-layered process of applying for United States visas for the boy and a female guardian. Two months into the process, the boy died.

“It was pretty crushing,'' said Heavey, a 33-year-old battalion surgeon assigned to the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division.

“It was disappointing to know there are academic facilities back home willing and able to help. But there were many logistical hurdles.''

Appalled by the state of Iraq's health-care system and frustrated by rules preventing military doctors from treating Iraqis, Heavey and a colleague, Captain John Knight, 36, began arranging for sick Iraqi children to receive free medical treatment abroad.

During their year-long deployment, which ended recently, they created a non-profit organisation that has sent 12 children overseas for medical care, funded by $17,000 that Heavey and Knight, a physician assistant, have contributed from their own pockets and raised from family and friends.

Turn after a trip

In 2007, Heavey and Knight visited a hospital where malnourished and neglected children rescued from an orphanage were being treated. Heavey and Knight were haunted by what they saw.

They decided to start the organisation but had their doubts: Maybe it wouldn't work at all. As Knight later explained : “We want to help people. We still really believe in what we do.''

From that point, the duo spent every spare minute on the organisation. They lugged their laptops along on missions so that they could work on their project during downtime.

They spent hours downloading documents using the outpost's maddeningly slow internet connection. They reached out to non-profits and sent e-mails to friends, acquaintances and friends of friends asking for help.

Their first case involved an 11-year-old boy who had been admitted to a US military hospital in Baghdad after being wounded in an insurgent attack. He had sustained severe burns and lost large amounts of tissue.

An infection required expensive antibiotics. Heavey contacted a friend at the University of Cincinnati, who agreed to take the case and found a family willing to take care of the boy and his grandmother during the treatment.

Things came together just as doctors at the military hospital in Baghdad were concluding that they had to discharge the boy.

Heavey and Knight purchased the airfare for the child and his grandmother, who left Baghdad in late April. They are still in Cincinnati, where the boy's treatment at Shriners Hospital for Children has gone well.

“We got one!'' Heavey told Knight after the boy and his grandmother left Iraq. “Now it's time to open the gate.''

Army lawyers told them they could raise money for the foundation as long as they didn't identify themselves as military officers. They hired an Indian company to create a website, Hope.MD.

Road to acceptance

The Internal Revenue Service responded to their application for non-profit status saying they would need to submit additional documents to demonstrate that the organisation wouldn't support terrorists.

“We found that to be particularly entertaining,'' Heavey said. The next few cases Heavey and Knight took on involved children who were legally blind.

Esen Karamursel Akpek, an ophthalmologist from Turkey at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, agreed to volunteer her services. The children are being treated at a hospital in Istanbul free of charge.

With several cases in the pipeline and the end of their deployment just a few months away, Heavey and Knight started thinking of ways to broaden the reach of their organisation.

Knight jokingly suggested that they raise money from defence contractors. “The next thing I knew, Jonathan was actually doing it,'' Knight said.