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Coverage |  Change of Heart
Friday, October 10, 2008
By KAY CAMPBELL
Times Faith & Values Editor
kay.campbell@htimes.com
For
about 25 years, John Carter worked at a Huntsville Army contractor to
make things, as he puts it, "to blow people up." Now he tries to bring
people together.
John, 48, a retired engineer, and his wife,
Cyndi, are volunteers for the Jerusalem-based Shevet Achim, a Christian
nonprofit whose name means "brothers sitting together" that coordinates
surgeries in Israel for children with heart problems. Children from the
Palestinian refugee areas, Iraq, and other areas without access to
modern surgery are brought to Israeli hospitals to have their hearts
repaired. All expenses are paid for the surgery and for a parent to
stay with them during recuperation.
The Carters have made a
couple of trips to Israel to meet children whom their own donations and
the donations of others have helped save. It does their own hearts
good, John said last week as he and Cyndi looked through some photos
from their trip.
"The world is full of people who wish to do us ill," John said. "We still need warriors, but my time in that is over."
John's
time was nearly over in every field about 10 years. At 38 - due to "a
poor choice in ancestors," he says - he had to have bypass surgery.
That meant he emerged with a chest scar to match those of Cyndi, whose
first heart surgery was at 7.
So when the couple learned of a
ministry to help children with faulty hearts, they had a very deep
understanding of what that meant in terms of pain for the children and
fright for the parents. And they also knew that a good life lay on the
other side of those surgeries.
"I saw a picture of a little girl
running away from the doctors," Cyndi said, describing the child
frightened by doctors who wanted to draw her blood. "And I thought,
'Yeah, that was me.' "
Cyndi sent the child an encouraging e-mail she knew could be translated to her native Kurdish by the Shevet Achim workers.
"Your heart goes out," Cyndi said.
Sponsoring a child for surgery is $5,000 to $7,000.
"That's chicken feed to a whole lot of people in Huntsville," John said. "And it could save a life."
But
the Carters wanted to make sure their money went to the children, not
to bureaucrats or paperwork. That's why they traveled to Israel to meet
the families whose children had been helped, the doctors who do the
surgery, and the administrators who work out of a low rock building in
Jerusalem said to have been the first hospital just for children in the
Middle East.
What they found, John said, is a lean organization
that does what it claims. It was founded in 1994 by a former reporter
who wanted to do more than watch tragedies unfold. And it's the
children, blue around the lips and gasping for breath, who open doors
in any language.
"There are so many people who can say no to
whatever you want to do in the Middle East," John said. "An oxygen tank
- think about it - even looks like a bomb."
But the children and
the oxygen tanks are allowed to pass into Israel, where the children,
usually Muslim, are escorted by the Christians of Shevet Achim to a
hospital where they are treated by Jewish physicians.
That cooperation is no less a miracle than the surgeries themselves, John said.
"We
Christian are still regarded as Crusaders in the Muslim world,
proselytizers or, what's sometimes worse, tourists, in the Jewish
world," he said. "But in this small ministry, the reality doesn't have
to look like the headlines."
The goal of the ministry is as
simple as that of the Good Samaritan's, John said: the healing of
wounds. The surgery does not come with a sermon attempting to get
anyone to change their personal faith.
"If you want to be
converted, good," John said. "But that's not why we're here. We're
going to do the Samaritan thing: Be the hands and feet of Jesus, and
leave the rest to God.
"This is a tender little ministry in a conflicted part of the world."
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