To recap, Vedat is a Bayash gypsy boy, now 11 years old, who is in need of spine surgery. He has a condition something like scoliosis, but instead of his spine just being bent, it’s practically cork-screwed. It’s a mess. If he doesn’t have the surgery, he’ll die from the pressure on his heart and lungs.
For a year now, a team of people here in the US and in Croatia have been working to get him over to have the necessary surgery done. It’s been incredibly slow and frustrating work, but everything happens in God’s timing.
The first real break came when I talked to a physician’s assistant friend of mine named Stacey and she took up the cause, too. She started making phone calls among contacts she had in the medical community and, to make a long story short, this along with much prayer led to everything Vedat will need on our end being donated. The surgeon, Dr. Reing, will be doing the two-part surgery pro bono, INOVA Fairfax hospital has offered it’s services pro bono, we have an anesthesiology team, a physical therapist, a doctor’s office (for pre-surgical and post-surgical check-ups), and they’re all pro bono. The company who manufactures the metal pieces that will need to be implanted in his spine is even donating them, and if that doesn’t seem like a big deal, maybe you don’t realize that if they hadn’t been donated, the cost for the implants alone would have been twenty-five to thirty-five thousand dollars.
Once all of the medical things had been taken care of, letters were written to the State Department to help expedite the visa process. We have someone who’s willing to house Vedat and his interpretter, Vedrana, for a few months at the beginning of his stay and we’ll be announcing the need for housing – as well as other ways people can help – to the rest of our church just after New Year’s.
All that’s left is getting him over here. The problem that’s being encountered now is on the Croatia – or really the Montenegro – side. (The people who are working on this over there are in Croatia, but Vedat is in a refugee camp in Montenegro.) The only identification that Vedat has had is his refugee card. To get a passport, he needs a birth certificate. He doesn’t officially exist yet because, having been born in a Bayash village in Kosovo and then escaping to Montenegro with his mother and siblings after his father’s murder, he was never registered anywhere and never had any need for any formal papers before now. Getting him his birth certificate has been a long, drawn out process.
A court date was finally set for this week or next (I’m not entirely clear which day it is) which should get Vedat the birth certificate, but there are still several paperwork things to go through before his passport and visa will be issued. Please be in prayer that these things will happen quickly. Vedat’s condition is deteriorating, and there is a very real possibility that he could either die or become so debilitated that he wouldn’t be able to fly over.