20 September 2008: Great News! Thanks to an overwhelming response from sponsors, Hope.MD has made several major breakthroughs. It took nearly a year to coordinate the process for our first child, and now in just a few months Hope.MD has helped ten more children. Just like in the Starfish Story more and more children are being helped as word spreads across the internet. Our first child was sponsored entirely by a small group of co-workers, and now almost a dozen children have received care through family and friends who joined the Foundation. Each time a sponsor emails the story of the Hope.MD Foundation to his friends, another generation of sponsors emerge to participate! Here is a photograph from a recent trip where ten children with debilitating eye disorders had their vision surgically restored:

23 May 2009: Hope.MD set a new major milestone! To our knowledge, Dr. Lazareff and Dr. Van de Wiele are the first academic civilian specialists to have traveled inside Iraq to perform surgery on children in theatre. Together with local physicians they evaluated twenty eight children in clinic and fourteen surgical candidates who will benefit from their efforts with the UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital.

June 2009: Thanks to Dr. Mitch Stotland and Dr. John Butterly from Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, a little girl named Fatima has a second chance on life. Fatima was injured in a gas explosion in her neighborhood that left her with extensive third degree burns. The burns were so severe they disfigured much of her torso and face, prevented her from using her hands, and limited her ability to eat food. In the interests of Fatima's privacy, and due to the graphic nature of her injuries, we have refrained from posting her photograph. She just successfully completed treatments that now enable her to eat food and use her hands normally again. She returned to her family in Iraq after months of extensive treatment that was made possible through the generosity of the Dartmouth community.

August 2009: Thanks to Dr. John Persing from Yale University New Haven Hospital, a little boy in Afghanistan will have an opportunity to receive reconstructive burn surgery. While his case remains in the preliminary logistical phases, he represents the first child in Afghanistan to have benefited from the program. We look forward to posting further information on his progress as it becomes available!

Fall 2009: Surgeons from a number of leading Universities including Vanderbilt, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and others have contacted the Hope.MD Foundation to discuss how they can arrange cases at their institutions. We look forward to cooperating with academic institutions through the international community as we work to expand the reach of our public initiatives. We hope we can fill this page with stories of lives that are forever changed by sponsors who help build a better world... one starfish at a time.

Thank you for sharing information about the Hope.MD Foundation with your friends and family. If you would like, you can copy and paste the URL below to add the Hope.MD logo to your blog, homepage, or email. Every email you send can help support the Foundation. Need help? Drop us a line at info@hope.md.