Scarlett was born on 18 May 2016, Jane’s only child. For the first few years, Jane had no idea anything was wrong with her daughter’s heart.
It was 2020 before she found out. A pediatrician at TMJ Hospital diagnosed Scarlett with a serious heart condition and referred her to the Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute in Dar es Salaam for specialist care.
Jane found her way to us through friends. Someone she knew knew someone who knew about The One New Heart Tanzania, and that thread led her to our work in Dodoma.
We met Scarlett in July 2021, at our first pediatric cardiac surgical mission there. Diagnostic catheterisation showed she was a candidate for surgery, but not surgery that could be done in Tanzania at the time. She would need to go abroad.
That took a while to arrange. Her operation was finally done in India in November 2022, and it went well.
What has happened since is the part worth telling. Scarlett is a healthy, active girl now, and somewhere along the way she started to paint. She turned out to be good at it. Recently she made a painting for us: our logo, drawn by hand.
A few years ago she was a child whose heart was failing and whose illness had gone unnamed. Now she paints. That is what the surgery was for.
