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Foundation Brings Sick Iranian Children to U.S. for Care

By Meghan Loftus

Nazie Eftekhari left Iran in 1979. She came to the United States to pursue graduate work at the University of Minnesota, got a job, married an American, and had two kids. She was living what some would call the American dream. But in 1990, she realized that something was missing.

"I decided at the time that what I wanted to do was give back to Iran," she said. "Who I am and what I am today is in large part a product of my heritage."

Leveraging her experience in health care - Eftekhari has a graduate degree in health care, and founded two businesses in the field - Eftekhari created the Foundation for the Children of Iran. The foundation brings severely ill children from Iran to the United States for medical treatment.

"I remember the doctors who delivered my kids. I remember every pediatrician. I remember every specialist that treated my kids. When you heal a child, you heal a family," Eftekhari said.

At their first fundraiser, Eftekhari and the other women of the foundation counted thousands of dollars of proceeds by hand. Soon after that first fundraiser, they had their first patient, a young boy with a heart abnormality being raised by a single father. There would be many more cases. "They all leave a mark," Eftekhari said.

A MEMORABLE CASE

One case involved a baby boy, a twin, who was born without an important heart valve. Doctors in Iran told the parents, whose other twin was perfectly healthy, that their baby did not have much longer to live. They applied for and were granted assistance by the foundation. Father and son traveled to Minnesota, and the baby had surgery. Suddenly, the baby took a turn for the worse and had to be moved to the intensive care unit, where he stayed for four months.

One day, Eftekhari got a call at her office saying the baby was close to death. She rushed to the hospital to be with the father as he said goodbye to his young son. The doctors wanted to take the baby back to the operating room and see if he could be saved, but they were frank in their assessment that the baby's prospects did not look good. Again, doctors said the boy would not make it.

Eftekhari turned to the father. "You have to forgive me," she said. "I didn't know this would happen."

"Forgive you?" he said. "You did everything you could. This was his destiny. What you did is to try to change his destiny, and it was not to be."

"I will never forget this kindness," he said.

They waited together for what they assumed to be bad news. But then, the unexpected happened.

"The son comes out alive," recalled Eftekhari. "It was the once-in-a-lifetime reaction to a drug that is supposed to keep heart rate stable during open heart surgery." As soon as doctors flushed the medication out of the boy's system, his heart rate returned to normal.

The memory "makes me cry to this day," she said.

THE FUTURE OF THE FOUNDATION

Patients who are recipients of the foundation's generosity often ask how they can repay Eftekhari and her team. She says there are two ways: pass on the information about the foundation or donate money.

"I'm sad to say that the need for our foundation has increased," she said. But Eftekhari hopes that one day "everything we do will be available in Iran and there will be no need for these kids to travel to the U.S."

Eftekhari said she would also like to find a way to focus on creating long-term, sustainable public health solutions in Iran.

In the meantime, Eftekhari will continue to show people what she calls "the great big heart of America."

"People are bound together by a command band of humanity," she said. "Somehow or another we've got to have a more profound and continuous dialogue so that some of these issues can get resolved even while the governments are talking and debating."

More information about the Foundation for the Children of Iran ( http://childrenofiran.org/ ) can be found at its Web site.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)