In Zambia, Israeli team helps train country’s first generation of pediatric cardiac surgeons

Reporter at The Times of Israel

After traveling over 600 miles with his father from a remote village in northwest Zambia, 9-year-old Richard Mbimbi underwent heart surgery at the National Heart Hospital in Lusaka on July 13.

Richard had rheumatic heart disease, an incapacitating condition that developed after a routine strep throat infection went untreated due to his family’s lack of access to antibiotics. The condition damaged two of Richard’s heart valves.

A team of pediatric cardiac surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists from Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) at Sylvan Adams Children’s Hospital at Wolfson Medical Center in the central Israeli city of Holon traveled to Zambia to supervise Richard’s surgery.

“My son is good,” Richard’s father, Robert Mbimbi, told The Times of Israel by telephone after the surgery. “The Zambian and Israeli doctors helped save the life of my child.”

The Israeli medical team assisted in 10 pediatric open-heart surgeries during their week-long mission at the Lusaka hospital and mentored the hospital’s pediatric cardiac unit staff, as well as several doctors who joined the mission from neighboring Tanzania.

While they were there, the team also unveiled a new $200,000 (NIS 608,000) LivaNova S-5 heart-lung machine, which temporarily takes over the work of a child’s heart and lungs during surgery.

Donated by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Bergman Family Charitable Foundation, it is the second machine in the country of 22.5 million people, which once lacked a single pediatric cardiac surgeon.

The machine and other specialized tools are part of a $3 million cooperative and infrastructure development program between SACH and Zambia that began in 2007.

The mission deepens relations between Zambia and Israel, which opened an embassy in Zambia in August 2025, almost 35 years after Jerusalem and Lusaka renewed relations.

Joining the mission were Wolfson pediatric intensive care specialist Dr. Oren Zipper and pediatric cardiac surgeon Dr. Hagi Dekel, who supervised Dr. Zakias Moonde Muulu, a Zambian pediatric heart surgeon currently completing the fifth year of his six-year SACH fellowship at Wolfson Medical Center.

“Zambia has many, many children who are suffering from heart conditions, and this brings a lot of hope to our children,” Muulu said.

Muulu will be the second pediatric heart surgeon in Zambia when he permanently returns to his homeland next year following his fellowship. The first pediatric cardiac surgeon, Dr. Mudaniso Ziwa, who works at Lusaka’s National Heart Hospital, completed a SACH fellowship in 2024.

“I trained Dr. Ziwa for six years in Israel, and then he went back home,” Dekel said. “Now I’m training the second generation, Dr. Muulu.”

“The focus of the missions to Zambia is not to go there and operate,” said Dekel, who had been to the Lusaka hospital once before and will go again in the fall. “It is to train the personnel, to strengthen the doctors on the ground, and to build their self-esteem and confidence.”

“We understood early on that we cannot save the whole world by ourselves,” he said. “So we are training personnel and staff from other countries to repair broken hearts.”

SACH, an Israeli humanitarian organization founded in 1995, has treated almost 8,500 children from 75 countries with limited or nonexistent access to pediatric cardiac care.

The nonprofit also provides fellowship training programs for medical professionals, primarily from Africa, who then return to their home countries to provide advanced medical services.

The organization’s $8 million annual budget is provided by private donors, including the late SACH honorary international chairman Morris Kahn, Israeli-Canadian businessman and philanthropist Sylvan Adams, the Azrieli Canada-Israel Foundation, the Ted Arison Family Foundation, and others.

The organization also encourages Israeli-trained doctors from Tanzania, Zambia, Ethiopia, and Rwanda to forge partnerships with one another.

More than 160 doctors and nurses have participated in the SACH program over the years. Currently, there are eight participating doctors, including Muulu.

He arrived in Israel in 2022. He was in the country during the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault on Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, and remained during the 12-day war with Iran in June 2025, when Iran fired 550 missiles and 1,000 drones, killing 32 people and wounding over 3,000. He has also weathered the latest cycle of violence with Iran, which began with renewed US-Israeli strikes on the Islamic regime in February.

“At first, it was scary to be in a place of active war, but with time, I  learned to live with it as Israelis do,” Muulu said. “It’s been a privilege to live among the Jewish people, and to see for myself their good times and challenging moments.”

“We were never able to treat children with heart problems until Save A Child’s Heart came on board,” Muulu said. “Many children still come to Israel for treatment, but not everyone can manage to go. The organization started training doctors to be able to offer this service in Zambia.”

“Israel remains committed to strengthening health collaboration with Zambia,” said Israel’s ambassador to Zambia, Ofra Farhi, in a statement. “This combination of the surgical mission and the unveiling of the new heart-lung machine demonstrates our long-term commitment to strengthening Zambia’s healthcare system through training, technology, and partnership.”

Muulu said that the fellowship program has encouraged him to “keep going.”

“It’s not just saving one child,” he said. “It’s not just one family. It’s the whole country. I’m doing this for the sake of those little innocent children who need a chance to live happily.”

The war with Iran has been draining for all of us in Israel. But when I heard about a high casualty incident – ballistic missile impacts in Arad and Dimona that left nearly 200 people wounded – I drank a cup of coffee, packed a bag, and headed south.

There, I spoke with Shilgit, the head of an after-school program for underprivileged youth. Standing outside her destroyed center, Shilgit said it was a miracle that no children were hurt and spoke about the community coming together in the hours since.

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