So what was it like to be the first American-based pediatric cardiac team in Tehran, Iran since 1979?
Wonderful people, incredible hospitality, eager to learn new techniques and protocols for the care of their children with heart disease and guess what? Not one anti-American word spoken to us the entire trip, amazed? Shouldn’t be because people all over the world are the same, it is our governments that create the friction.
One side note for all of you, we cannot seem to get away from Iraqi children. The mother in the photo below is holding her 26 day old newborn who we performed an arterial switch operation on and as you can see the baby is fine. The mother is from Baghdad and she went to Nasiriyah to find our team and was told we were not there, but in Iran, so she came to Tehran to find us and have us operate on her child.
Imagine that, an Iraqi mother traveled to Iran to have an American team operate on her baby, this is the kind of diplomacy we love. We will be returning to Tehran in November, to do more work and to spread the diplomacy of Good Will!
