Editors Note: Repairing tiny faulty hearts in Maputo - what's Tina Turner got to do with it?In our busy interconnected lives, the only spaces where we are off-line and off-cellphone may be the shower and the airplane. Showers one mostly takes alone. Planes are a collective space but we, mass travel sufferers and on-line junkies, act as if they weren’t.
We shut down and hunker into our individual bubble without even a hello to the next passenger. We use flight time to read, work, doze, or just be, as Greta Garbo would say: Ah-lone.
It is understandable. As the busy on-line editor of PlusNews Portuguese and the single mother of a teen girl, the only time when NOBODY interrupted me was on a plane.
Yet ignoring the person seated or sleeping next to us is a loss. Every time I broke the isolation bubble and inquired why my fellow passenger was cruising at 35,000 feet, I found interesting people and interesting things.
On the plane that brought me from Johannesburg to Maputo this month for my Knight Health Fellowship, I noticed the colourful passport of the blond young man next to me as he filled in the Mozambican immigration form. The red cover had embossed stars; each page had a different toy-like drawing of castles, cathedrals, and villages. I couldn’t resist. I asked.
It turns out that he was Igor Zilincan, a journalist travelling with a team of Swiss doctors to perform open-heart surgery on Mozambican children and to train local surgeons to do it.
Bingo! I had my first story idea for Savana, the independent newsweekly where I will be working. Even better, the following day, the team’s heart surgeon, Rene Pretre, was voted Swiss Person of the year 2009.
Bingo! A newspeg. The editor at Savana liked the idea and off we went, the reporter I am coaching and the staff photographer, to the Heart Institute. We donned green sterile scrubs and went into the post-op unit where nurses fussed over tiny tots.
And so it was that in the first week working in the newsroom, Savana carried a centrespread about 18 “blue children” (from poor blood circulation) given the chance of a healthy life, and an interview with Pretre, a top specialist on paediatric cardiac surgery, whose wife texted him in his cellphone, while he was at a restaurant by the seaside in Maputo, that viewers at the three main TV stations had voted him Swiss of the Year, along with singer Tina Turner, a long-time Zurich resident.
The last operation was on the smallest child, 4.5 kgs, whose heart was the size of an apricot (below). Two Mozambican surgeons who have been training with Pretre since 2006 performed the open heart ops alone – a first for Mozambique.