Padmalal Jayawardena

One of the original children helped through the combined efforts of Children's Heart Project and Gift of Life, young Padmalal Jayawardena, provides an excellent example of what the intervention of caring people can do. Padmalal was a fourteen-year-old lad from a remote village off Pollannaruwa when he was brought to Phoenix for open-heart surgery. His father, a poor farmer, would not have been able to afford the surgical intervention even if it had been possible to receive this treatment in his country. When the doctors examined him, he was so incapacitated and short of breath that he could walk only a short distance on his own, and his father had to carry him to school each day. Ideally, his defect should have been corrected by 2 years of age.

Fortunately, he was yet operable, and following a completely successful surgery, he returned to Sri Lanka as a new person. Every year, Padmalal visits the team of doctors when they arrive to the National Hospital in Colombo. It is most gratifying to see the change in him. A robust man of 24, he is now a fluent reader and writer in both English and Singhalese, and he plans to enter the university. He tells the doctors how grateful he is to be alive and well, but he doesn't have to as they can see it in his face, and the faces of his father and other family members.