HANOI – Thien Nhan & Friends, a program aimed at organizing genital reconstruction surgeries for Vietnamese children with severe urological birth defects and rare urological conditions, has restarted and will give free surgeries to 50 children in Hanoi, Danang and HCMC in October 2022 after two years of interruption due to the Covid pandemic.
This year, the Thien Nhan & Friends program will also plan to offer medical examination and screening for 200 other patients.
During the pandemic, doctors were unable to fly to Vietnam to carry out missions to help children with genital disabilities. However, the program, which has been run for a decade, will continue this journey into the second half of 2022, and the surgeries will go on again.
Through the program, thousands of additional unlucky children will be examined and operated on, just as it has been for the past 10 years.
The program restarted in Vietnam with a live show called “Forever Magic” held by singer Ngoc Anh in Hanoi City on February 10.
Apart from the performance of singer Ngoc Anh at the live show, singer Le Viet Anh, who always performs at every music night of Thien Nhan & Friends, and singers Mai Lan, Nguyen Quang Tu and Khuat Thanh Thuy were also on this stage.
The music night raised a fund of VND1 billion, equivalent to 20 surgeries, for Thien Nhan & Friends.
The program was inspired by the miracle story of Thien Nhan, an infant discarded at birth and left unattended to in a jungle. He suffered traumatic amputation of his genitals and loss of one leg from a brutal mauling by wild animals.
Having persevered through all the struggles to obtain medical assistance for Thien Nhan, Greig Craft, an American philanthropist, Tran Mai Anh, Thien Nhan’s adoptive mother and Dr. Roberto De Castro established the program in 2011.
Since August 2011, several voluntary delegations of Italian and American doctors led by Dr. Roberto De Castro have traveled to Vietnam and performed 487 surgeries and given medical examination to 1,500 children.
Aside from the medical treatment, Thien Nhan & Friends, in collaboration with local hospitals, has organized some conferences on urological and genital reconstruction with the participation of hundreds of doctors at the National Hospital of Children in Hanoi City, the Danang Hospital for Women and Children, the Children’s Hospital 2 in HCMC and Viet Duc Hospital in Hanoi. The program has also donated surgical devices for many hospitals in Vietnam.
