Finding It in Their Hearts
Life-Altering Lessons, Lifesaving Surgery Outlast School Trip
By Leef Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 20, 2002; Page B01
Mantaine Minis, 6, was living in a hut in a remote village in Kenya, in need of lifesaving heart surgery, when the improbable happened one day in June. A group of students and parents from the Langley School in McLean was on safari at the Masai Mara National Reserve, where Mantaine's father is a game warden.
That's when someone from the village told a Langley teacher about Mantaine's heart problem. From there, things seemed to unfold quickly.
The teacher, Joseph Lekuton, knew that one of the parents was a Fairfax County heart surgeon. He also knew that people of the Masai village, who didn't own much, had sold 14 cows last year to raise money to donate to relief efforts in the United States after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
So he helped launch a campfire discussion about the Masai gift and about what a group of people from an American suburb could do to return a kindness.
"It wasn't a lot of money, but they gave those cows to say, 'Here, we feel your loss,' " Lekuton said he told the group before telling them Mantaine's story. "So, I asked the children, 'What can we do to help them?' . . . Really, it was magical. In just a short moment everyone agreed 'We can help her.' "
Edward A. Lefrak, chief of cardiac surgery at Inova Fairfax Hospital, borrowed a stethoscope to listen to Mantaine's heart and agreed to treat her in the United States. Don Hutchins, on the trip with his wife and two teenage children, offered to pay the airfare.
"We all felt it would be nice if we could help her," Hutchins said. "I said, 'Maybe I can arrange some [plane] tickets.' It was just talk, then Joseph [Lekuton] said, 'Okay, Don, you're going to fly her back, and Ed, you're going to do the surgery.' It was just off and running from there."
Or as Lefrak put it: "The stars just lined up for this child."
Yesterday morning, Mantaine underwent surgery at Inova Fairfax Hospital for Children, where a team of doctors led by pediatric cardiac surgeon Bechara Akl and assisted by Lefrak sealed an open blood vessel near her heart.
In less than two hours in the operating room, the little girl's life was turned around. Gone, doctors said, is the near certainty that she would have developed pulmonary hypertension within a few years, leading to her death. Gone, too, they expect, is the debilitating lethargy that has, until now, disrupted her childhood.
"They've done something marvelous," said Mantaine's father, Stephen Minis, 34, who waited nervously during the procedure. "She can live a normal life now. No medicine. No drugs. A normal child. I'll never forget in my life the Americans who helped us."
Minis said he couldn't have afforded the expensive procedure his daughter required. The closest cardiologist was more than 100 miles away in Nairobi, the surgical waiting lists there were clogged with patients, and the only way Minis could have scraped together enough money for treatment would have been to sell some of his family's cows, which help support his two wives and four children.
The vast majority of children born in the United States with the same congenital heart defect -- a condition known as patent ductus arteriosus -- would be treated much earlier, before more invasive surgery became necessary. But in the Third World, surgery is anything but commonplace, medical maladies can go untreated for years and diseases easily dealt with elsewhere often prove fatal. It wasn't until Mantaine arrived in the United States a few days ago that an echocardiogram would confirm that she had the suspected heart defect.
"The medical care is just so poor there," said Lefrak's wife, Trudy, who had joined her husband and three daughters on the summer trip. "You see all kinds of diseases that have never been corrected. You just want to reach out and help everyone."
That overwhelming sense of goodwill is one of the main forces behind the Langley trips, which have been led for five years by Lekuton, a social studies teacher at the McLean school. Lekuton is a native of Kenya and grew up among the Masai, a semi-nomadic tribe whose survival depends on cattle.
Lekuton says his trips provide an unusual opportunity to broaden the worldview of U.S. children whose parents can afford to treat them to a two-week, $5,000 vacation on the Serengeti plains. In addition to seeing an impressive array of wild animals, the young travelers spent a good deal of time meeting villagers and sharing their experiences with Kenyan schoolchildren.
"It gives them a real understanding of human beings," said Lekuton, who has taught for seven years at Langley, a private school with students in kindergarten through eighth grade. "We live different lives and have different problems, but we all need help once in a while."
Choosing to help others, he said, makes his students "better people, rather than being secluded McLean children who are well-off."
Lekuton, who is pursuing a master's degree at Harvard, said this year's safari is sure to reverberate for a long time, both because Mantaine received desperately needed medical help and because his students have been touched by making it possible.
"That memory will never leave them," he said.
Stephen Minis was stunned by the generous offer. "I never could have imagined something like this," he said, struggling to explain the gift. "It's just God's plan."
When Mantaine and her father arrived at Dulles International Airport on Sunday afternoon, they were met by a small but enthusiastic contingent of banner-waving, teddy-bear-hugging Langley students and their families. The two have been staying with the Lefraks at their house in McLean.
On Tuesday, Mantaine was hard at work in a playroom at the Lefrak home dressing Barbie dolls, which she then escorted across the floor in a plastic horse carriage.
Minis said that while his daughter has bursts of energy, her condition has made her tire quickly, as she did on Monday, falling asleep at the dinner table, her meal of chicken and rice unfinished.
Yesterday, Mantaine woke shortly after the operation and asked for food. A good sign, her father said. Clutching her doll, she drifted back to sleep. In a few days, she'll leave the hospital. In 10 days, barring complications, she and her father will return to their village.
The operation "was a very tough exercise, but everything is okay," said a relieved Minis. "It is only God that would send Doctor Lefrak into the Mara."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
