Roida is 7 years old. Ramadhani is 1 year and 8 months. Both are home now, recovering after open-heart surgery, something that was far from certain a year ago.
Both were born with Tetralogy of Fallot, a complex condition made up of four heart defects that occur together and disrupt the flow of blood between the heart and the lungs. The diagnosis came in early March 2024 at Mbeya Zonal Referral Hospital, during a children’s heart camp we ran with Atul Prabhu, a pediatric interventional cardiologist and electrophysiologist from India.
Their cases were severe enough to need open-heart surgery, and at the time that meant sending them abroad. Getting them there was not simple. The families faced financial strain, regulatory hurdles, and the ordinary difficulty of moving a sick child across borders. Our first choice of hospital could not take them because of policy limits, and we had to begin again with new options.
The journey ran across the country and then out of it, over 1,000 kilometres of travel within Tanzania before the families even reached India. It also took a long list of people willing to help: our team at The One New Heart Tanzania, Dr. Atul Prabhu, the Ministry of Health Zanzibar, Ark Associates Ltd, Container Concepts Limited, the Tanzania Red Cross Society, Narayana Health in Bangalore, and the Embassy of Tanzania in India, which helped clear the regulatory path.
The surgeries were done in January 2025. Both children came through them, and both are recovering well. It does, as we often say, take many hearts to heal one little heart.
