EHIZOGIE IGHOBOR STORY

In 2003 he was taken to Banjul the Gambia, Dakar and Ghana all in a desperate attempt to get him in good health. This boy and his mother were flown to Paris where he successfully had an operation in 2006 to repair his heart with the help of Pikin Bizness. Only 33 days after leaving Freetown, the chronically ill five-year old Ehizogie “Zogie” Ighobor, who has suffered from severe pulmonary stenosis of the heart value since birth, has successfully returned to Sierra Leone with a new lease on life. Miracles consist of 80% hard work and 20% luck. Today Sierra Leone can boast of its second miracle this year, as little Zogie Ighobor successfully received emergency open-heart surgery in Paris’s ultra-modern Pompidou European Hospital and then recovered in record time at the Château de la Cote cardiaque hospice for children in the French countryside not far from Versailles. Early on Sunday morning I drove the spirited boy and his jubilant although exhausted mother, Yema Ganda, to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and placed Zogie and
Yema onto a crowded SN Brussels flight to Brussels flight to Belgium, where they were met by Pikin Bizness founder Adonis Abboud.
Essentially, Abboud and I are running our own underground railroad for critically ill children. We have helped save two lives in this way; we have a list of Sierra Leonean children and we are determined to save them all. The heart surgeon Dr. Chauvaud and his team at the Pompidou Hospital provided the operation based on the diagnosis of Professor Daniel Sidi and his team at Necker Hospital for children. Following the dramatic recovery of 6 year old Abubakarr Jalloh, whose hole in the heart condition was repaired in Paris’s Hospital Necker by Professor Leca and her Mecenat Cardioloque, Zogie’s mother Yema Ganda, a journalist at the UN Special Court in Freetown, contacted Adonis Abboud and emailed myself in hope of finding a miracle for her frail son, who weighed 15 kilos and whose life has been in peril since he passed out as an infant of only several weeks. It took six months to organize Zogie’s medical sejour to France. Admittedly, the story has a happy ending, but rather tragic sub-plot. Zogie’s life has been saved, but the country continues to suffer from a severe lack of equipment and trained professionals. There is a dramatic need for more cardiologists in Sierra Leone, and there is not even one cardio sonogram machine in the capital, a sophisticated but commonplace tool needed for all accurate diagnoses. The sonogram is the backbone of not only heart and vascular cases, and critically necessary in detecting problems in pregnancy Freetown’s sole cardiologist, German-trained Dr. Olu-Black was able to evaluate Zogie’s condition due to his long and valuable expertise. the renowned cardiologist Professor Daniel Sidi who had reviewed Dr. Olu-Black’s documentation, instantly recognized the severity of Zogie’s stenosis, and called his colleagues at the Pompidou Hospital in hope of finding an opening slot for the four hour operation. Pikin Bizness and Anglophone Media plan to ask President Kabbah to invite Professor Sidi and Ms. DeMoly to Freetown to set up a diagnostic clinic to examine the children who await cardiaque treatment.