Spanish Foundation Provides Life-Saving Care for Moroccan Child with Rare Disease

At a year and a half, Taha had already undergone heart surgery at the Malaga Mother and Child Hospital. The little Moroccan boy had stayed with a host family during this first, short stay. This time, Pablo and Pilar welcomed him with their two daughters aged 4 and 3.

"Being a host family is a couple’s decision and when they told my husband and me, we were very nervous because we didn’t know how it was going to go, but now I recommend the experience to everyone," Pilar explains to Diario Sur. It’s a matter of responsibility, since the child is not on vacation, but to recover from an operation, she adds, specifying that in Taha’s case, he was "very shy at first, but became very friendly with my daughters and in the end, they were like brothers during his stay."

The separation is also difficult, Pilar observes. "We had to explain to the girls that Taha had to leave because he had his family in Morocco," she confides. Taha returned to Morocco last week, after spending six months in a host family in Malaga, as Morocco had closed its borders to limit the spread of Covid-19. During his stay, he underwent check-ups and in a few years, as he grows older, the medical team will study the possibility of operating on him again, Pilar said.

The Terre des Hommes Foundation, through its "Viaje hacia la vida" program, organizes these stays in Spain to treat children from African countries such as Morocco, Senegal, Benin, Togo, Mauritania, Mali and Guinea Conakry who have a pathology. More than 800 children have already been operated on in hospitals in Madrid, Galicia or Andalusia, and housed in each city by host families.