South Sudan's English Daily Newspaper
"We Dare where others fear"
By Okech Francis
Job and Christine, two children from the Silvestros family in Juba now feel relieved after undergoing live-saving heart treatments in Israel.
Several visits to Al Sabah Children’s hospital in the South Sudanese capital could not offer remedy to the difficulty in breathing that Job, 17 years and Christine, 5 years were experiencing.
They are now back in Juba after being treated for congenital heart disease by SACH (Save a Child’s Heart) medical team, in life-saving heart procedures in Israel.
According to the siblings’ mother, both children kept visiting Al Sabah hospital but no treatment could relief their ailment.
“The big one, Job, when he was 17 years, he presented with difficulty in breathing and I took him to Al Sabah hospital. There, they told me that he had a heart problem causing the difficulty in breathing,” the mother said.
“For the little one, it started when she was 7 years, and she suffered. We went 5 times with her to the hospital in one month. At that time her breathing was also very difficult.”
Now back from SACH, there is no longer any threat to the lives of the two children.
“The elder brother had a large hole between the two main chambers of the heart and to our surprise also, the little girl Christine, she had the same defect,” Dr. Alorna Raucher Sternfeld, Director of Pediatric Cardiology at SACH, who treated the children said.
The little girl, “because she is smaller, she needed to go an open heart surgery while Job the older, we could only solve his problem by catheterization,” Sternfeld said.
Dr. Sagi Assa, the Head of Interventional Pediatric Cardiology Unit at the same facility said that despite the complication in Job’s case, “he is going to live a normal life and he doesn’t need to go through a major surgery” like opening up of his chest or bypass machine and would heal in a few weeks.
Since July 2023, SACH treated about 70 children with heart diseases, Israel’s ambassador to South Sudan, H.E. Gershon Kedar said, noting that there wasn’t any logistical problems.
South Sudan’s Ambassador to Israel, Wol Mayar Ariec, hailed Israel for helping to treat the heart problems which would prove too costly for the South Sudanese.
“For the case of South Sudan we have no facility as yet and therefore this program sits very well with people of South Sudan and for the children of South Sudan,” Ariec said.
“If we are saving lives through our friends, the Israeli friends, then it’s more appreciated.”
According to Ariec, “the program of Save the Child’s Heart is a great story to be told, particularly about this family of two which got an opportunity for their lives to be saved.”
“If you are a parent, can you choose one child to die and one child to live?” he pondered.
