MC Endeavors Inc (MSMY)

[iamnottheone]

repost from suetta915
on Lewis Lucke MSMY board member

Haitian girl travels to Austin for life-saving heart surgery.


A 10-year-old girl from Haiti who has no mother or father is in Austin for life-saving heart surgery under the auspices of the Austin-based HeartGift Foundation.

Leonise Louima arrived in Austin on Sunday night, accompanied by her aunt, Shella Casseus. Leonise’s travel was donated by the American Airlines Miles for Kids program.

After undergoing medical tests, Leonise will have surgery at Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas to repair a heart defect called patent ductus arteriosus (PDA). PDA happens when a blood vessel called the ductus arteriosus fails to close normally in an infant soon after birth. (The word “patent” means open.) The condition leads to abnormal blood flow between the aorta and pulmonary artery – two major vessels that carry blood from the heart.

Leonise, a third-grader, lives with her aunt, her grandmother, her four sisters, her brother and several cousins in the Haitian city of Gonaïves. Leonise’s father died in 2001; her mother died in 2005.

In Central Texas, Leonise and her aunt will be staying with Yvrance Joseph, a native of Haiti who has lived in the United States for 30 years.

HeartGift supporter Lewis Lucke of Austin, a U.S. ambassador from 2004 to 2006, helped secure travel visas for Leonise and her aunt. Lucke was U.S. response coordinator for the Haiti earthquake in 2010.

Lucke served 27 years with the U.S. Agency for International Development, including service as the agency’s first mission director in Iraq as well as in Haiti.

“It is a wonderful thing that HeartGift is doing for Leonise,” Lucke says. “Haitians in general have been through so much hardship and trauma since last January’s earthquake. It is a truly special that such a great difference can be made in the life of one little Haitian girl.”

The HeartGift Foundation, which is based in Austin, brings children from around the world to the United States for surgery to correct life-threatening heart defects. These children come to the United States because their home countries lack adequate health care; they leave with repaired hearts and a new sense of hope for the future.

To learn more about HeartGift, visit www.heartgift.org.

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