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An afternoon with Heart to Heart
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On a warm September Sunday afternoon I accompanied Jeffrey Ginter, Cristina Pelaez, and Stephanie Keller from Shanghai Community International School Hongqiao’s ECE campus on a visit to Yodak Hospital.
We wanted to see Ran Haochen, the ECE’s most recent heart patient whom they supported through funds raised in May’s Art Auction and Student Art Sale at the ECE campus.
We arrived at the hospital and took the back stairs to the third floor to meet with Heart to Heart’s Manager of Assembly DJ Wizniak. He was in their Assembly Room, readying supplies for an upcoming trip to Jiangsu Province to supply household goods and clothing to the students of four schools. Former patients and their families in the area also will receive supplies. The jumbo rip-stop bags were piled to the ceiling. SCIS parent and Heart to Heart’s Director of Finance Bertha Sambolin would be accompanying him.
Together we climbed the stairs to the rooms reserved for babies recovering from surgery. Here we found Ran Haochen sleeping in the arms of his mother, a slim woman in a navy striped shirt. A few weeks after his birth, Ran had surgery for an intestinal obstruction, indebting the family, and they were subsequently unable to afford an operation to repair his heart condition known as a ventricular septal defect.
Ran’s heart operation was successful, although a post-operative lung infection has slowed his recovery. He has been in the hospital for a month already, and will have celebrated his first birthday during his hospital stay.
The family is from a village in Shandong Province; his parents left their four-year-old daughter at home with her grandparents while they are here for a month with Ran. He is a cute little guy, long and a bit too thin with big ears and four teeth each on the top and bottom gums. Like all babies, he managed to shed one of his socks during our visit, but did not seem bothered.
As we returned to the Assembly Room, Wizniak proudly told us that Heart to Heart to date has funded heart operations for 916 children in China and supplied 76 libraries with books.
We were also able to see Heart to Heart’s playroom, which is open two hours daily to all children in the hospital, whether they are patients or visitors. The playroom’s shelves are packed with blocks and doll houses, while play cars, mini kitchens and construction vehicles, and a wide play table take up the floor space. A mural with an undersea theme enlivens one wall, a happy swordfish and whale shark greeting the youngsters. Heart to Heart is hoping for other artist volunteers to complete a planned rainforest mural.
During our tour of the playroom, a lively Tibetan boy with bright blue sneakers zipped around on a mini tractor, nimbly avoiding plowing over our feet. He is the final patient in a group of nine who arrived in July for heart operations. According to Wizniak, many of the Tibetan parents who accompanied their children wore their traditional dress, brightening the hospital’s halls. This boy’s level of activity is even more remarkable considering that he could hardly move when he arrived in July. Later that day, he and his family were able to start their two-week journey back to Tibet.
As we left the hospital that afternoon for the busy roads of Xuhui, we all felt grateful for the chance to see how these children’s lives have improved after surgery. Thank you, Heart to Heart.
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