By Lawrence Faulkner

I should have left for Islamabad via London on Sunday the 9th May, but the Icelandic volcano had other ideas!   I had almost given up but by the afternoon the level of ash seemed to reduce so I booked a new flight the next day via Rome Fiumicino.  Excellent decision, I arrived in Karachi via Dubai on Tuesday the 11th at 4.30 in the morning, a car from the hotel was waiting for me.  I slept for a couple of hours, then I met Sadaf at the hotel to go to meet Tahir Shamsi and his colleagues at the National Institute for Blood Diseases.  We spoke of the various patients and future prospects, very interesting, we are all thrilled with the results.  All of the children who have received  transplants are doing very well. I met with a family of a child with low risk  thalassemia and a matched donor, they are rich and want to go to Italy,  I try to convince them that there is no reason for them to do this, I don’t know if I have succeeded.

In the early afternoon a meeting with Ali J Siddiqui, a brilliant young Pakistani and a Director of a large company, the JS Group, and member of the Board of Directors of the Acumen Fund.  He seems very interested in our activities and is sensitive to this issue.    I will present a brief proposal, which he has pledged to consider carefully.   Acumen Fund is a large non-profit organization geared to support projects that have a high probability of financial autonomy in the long term, their tools are loans and partnerships in projects geared towards social enterprise. The meeting was very interesting, so much so  that  I missed the plane to Islamabad.

The next morning I awoke at 5am and again to the airport, off to Islamabad for a same day to meeting, firstly to meet with the Directors of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) and then in the afternoon, with the Italian Ambassador Vincenzo Prati, who is always very helpful and hospitable. The doctors and nurses of the bone marrow transplant unit  “Simone Montomoli” appear to be very happy and very motivated. They have good reason to be, I am very proud of what we are doing together and especially how we have used the donations and the trust of our many supporters.

Together with the administration of PIMS we discuss a plan to gradually make them independent, financially and professionally, the  bone marrow transplant service that is now running with 12 transplants already performed.  On Saturday morning a small symposium on  thalassemia and transplants involving many people including coordinators from thalassemia centers such as doctors Atifa Shuaib and Tahira Zafar, the latter had worked earlier in PIMS and has seen the birth of our project.
In the evening we are invited to dinner by Sara Rezoagli, head the Italian delegation in Pakistan (Deputy Ambassador), where we spend a pleasant evening getting to know other Italians who were in Islamabad for different reasons.

During this visit I am even more motivated, I go back with new ideas and plans for the next step. Whilst travelling I read the new book by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, “Building Social Business”, in which which he has devoted an entire chapter to Cure2Children, I still can not believe it!