The Original Idea
While working in the cardiac surgical intensive care unit in 2001, Dr. Tondo began to speak about his efforts to help his country of origin, Ethiopia. His areas of involvement include both the improvement of medical care and projects for environmental protection. At that time, Dr. Tondo organized individual heart operations in Germany on Ethiopian children suffering from heart valve disease. But he not only wanted to help individual children, he wanted to lay the groundwork for better medical care of such cases in his homeland because pediatric heart disease is neither a rare problem nor a disease of the affluent population in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia lies in eastern equatorial Africa on the Horn of Africa. In 2001, there was not a single hospital there with the ability to perform a cardiac surgical operation.
During one of Dr. Tondo’s conversations about the problems in Ethiopia, Cornelia Schollbach was listening. Cornelia Schollbach is a nurse working in the cardiac surgical intensive care unit in the Department of Cardiac, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery in the Braunschweig City Hospital. She asked if it was not possible to send a complete team of doctors, cardiac perfusionists, and nursing professionals as well as all of the necessary medical equipment to Addis Ababa for a certain period of time in order to perform a limited number of heart valve replacement operations in Ethiopia.
The idea for the Heart for Ethiopia Project was born .