Imagine your child has just been diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. The only way she’ll survive is through surgery. You have no healthcare except through a clinic in a nearby village. One of the medical missionaries there says that your daughter can be cured, but you’ll have to fly her to the United States (you’ve never been on a plane), spend four weeks in a stranger’s home (you’ve never left your country) and let doctors you’ve never met perform the operation.

But she’ll be cured. And it won’t cost you anything.

This is the incredible offer that the HeartGift Foundation, the brainchild of John “Chip” Oswalt ’68, has made to more than 150 families of children in developing countries. The nonprofit provides free corrective heart surgeries to children with no access to health care. Air travel, a host family, meals and translation are all part of the package.

“Each year there are more than 8,000 children born with heart defects who will never have any access to medical care just because of where they’re born,” says Oswalt, a cardiothoracic surgeon in Austin. HeartGift aims to help as many as it can.

The idea came to him 12 years ago when a colleague on a medical mission trip to Kosovo called with a question. The doctor was working in a refugee camp and had met six children with congenital heart defects that had no way of being fixed in Kosovo. If the kids could get to Austin, could Oswalt’s group operate on them? With a combination of in-kind donations and donor funding, the doctors arranged for the kids to fly to Texas, have their surgery, and return home with new lives.

Inspired, Oswalt talked to friends Ray Wilkerson ’71 (MS ’73) and Jim Hoover, and the three decided to start a nonprofit to help more children. HeartGift now has chapters in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans and Fort Worth. And the nonprofit will continue to expand wherever there is funding and a partner hospital with a pediatric heart program.

While HeartGift’s donors and volunteers go to incredible lengths, so do the children and their parents.

“We have to compliment the commitment of the family member to step out of their world and hand their child over to a complete stranger to save their life,” Oswalt says. He doesn’t do pediatric heart operations himself, but he does strategic work for the nonprofit every day and meets the children saved by the Austin chapter.

One of his favorite HeartGift stories is that of Norbu, a young Tibetan Buddhist monk from Nepal. The little boy had been chosen to join the monastery at age 5, but the monks soon noticed his slow growth. After Norbu was diagnosed with a heart defect, his caretaker in the temple found HeartGift online and accompanied the boy to Austin for the operation.

Another recipient was a 6-year-old Chinese boy whose mother committed suicide when she realized her son had a heart defect. The boy’s father learned about HeartGift, but the grandparents didn’t want to send him to the United States for fear the doctors would steal him (“we’ve heard that multiple times,” Oswalt says).

The little boy flew to Austin by himself and stayed with a HeartGift board member who was fluent in Mandarin. When he returned home, healed, perspectives in the village changed.

“We’re not only saving the child’s life, we’re creating great ambassadorship to places where we don’t necessarily have great relations as a country,” Oswalt says. HeartGift recipients have traveled from Iraq, Iran and China, among other countries. “When the children come back well, it changes attitudes about [the United States].”

Growing up, Oswalt watched his father, Charles E. Oswalt II ’36, a family practitioner in the small West Texas town of Fort Stockton, care for people who couldn’t pay him. Sometimes the elder Oswalt accepted homemade food in lieu of money.

“Part of your job as a physician is to give back — you have to take care of the indigent,” Oswalt says. He and his three brothers went on to become doctors themselves — and all four of them, plus Oswalt’s sister, are Horned Frogs.

“My family became a TCU family, and that whole mentality of family makes you want to connect with other people and give back.”

On the Web:
heartgift.org