Helping Repair China's Hearts
By Brian Offenther
Short in stature with matching cropped hair, Christine Cullen is your archetypical grandmother. The 61 year old wears a red knitted sweater underneath her autumn coat and talks with a sweet, yet firm voice. Though calming, her look shouldn't be confused with passivity. Her tireless, immense efforts have lead to life-saving surgery for 485 children and assistance for countless others. She is Shanghai's heart warrior.
Christine Cullen is the founder and Executive Director of Heart to Heart Shanghai, a community outreach group whose main focus is providing financial assistance for heart surgery to children in China. Heart to Heart also follows up with playrooms to assist in the childrens' recovery post-surgery, donates books to their respective rural schools and provides clothing and toiletries to their families.
Founded in 2003, Heart to Heart was known as Gift of Life Friends until 2006. At first, the group's aim was to build a playroom at hospitals for children with congenital heart defects. “It was very much a low key thing not intending to be anything other than that,” Cullen says.
Things changed, as they often do, after a visit to the doctor – in this case the chief surgeon of Shanghai Chest Hospital, Dr Chen Chun. During her visit to Dr Chun's office, Cullen noticed “stacks of applications that had been sent from provincial woman's federations asking whether there was any financial aid available [for children with heart defects].” None was – meaning the worst.
“So with our first little bit of money, we decided that we would sponsor [a surgery].” As these type of surgeries cost around RMB 25,000, that's what Cullen and Heart to Heart decided to donate for that first operation. Close to 500 surgeries later, that is still their main focus.
A problem of course is that the estimated RMB 12,500,000 required doesn't come from nowhere, and so they had to develop a scheme to raise funds. In October 2005, the Heart Bear was born.
The Heart Bear has the usual plush limbs and big, beady eyes, but your standard Care Bear or Carrefour basket special wasn't knitted a sweater by volunteers in Shanghai. While the more than 13,000 Heart Bears that have been sold might be a speck in the grand total of teddies, others aren't affixed with a name tag that says “A good doctor repaired my heart and now I can walk to school!”
Heart to Heart now performs more surgeries than ever imagined, and in addition to its work providing surgeries, the non-profit also runs three playrooms seven days a week. For an experience that may end with a smiling child colouring in a playroom, the story might start out as harrowing as can be imagined. Cullen recalls a particular family helped by her group.
For a young couple in Jiangsu Province, both their baby and the father's father required heart surgery. “They could maybe give a little bit to the grandfather's [surgery],” Cullen explains, “but they didn't have enough to do both.”
“So they had to actually look at it from reality. If they fixed the grandfather's problem, he could then continue to work on the farm, which would at least feed the family, and it would mean that then the father of the child could go away to be a migrant worker. But the baby's heart would not be fixed until they had saved enough money. So they had to make this choice. Heart to Heart handled the baby's surgery; their savings went to the grandfather. How could you have made that sort of decision in life, being the mother of this child? That's the situation they were in.”
When telling the story Christine Cullen never mentions the grandmother. But as her voice begins to fade by the end, you almost want it to be her. And in a way, she is.
