James Sirleaf decided to take a break from work in 2005 and visit his native Liberia, which then was recovering from a long civil war.
His mother was running for president of the fragile democracy, and Sirleaf, Senior Emergency Physician at Bridgeport Hospital and Clinical Instructor at Yale-New Haven Hospital, felt the country had stabilized enough to be a safe vacation spot.
Instead of heading for the beach, however, Sirleaf visited John F. Kennedy Hospital in Monrovia, where he had spent some time as a younger man. The lack of resources and deep need for medical help were eye-opening.
“Whoa, this is really bad,” Sirleaf remembers thinking. He spent his vacation tending the sick and teaching fellow caregivers. They implored him to come back, so he did the first chance he got—and several times since.
Sirleaf quickly realized he could do more by setting up an organization, so he created Health Education And Relief Through Teaching (HEARTT), a non-governmental organization based in Liberia. HEARTT’s mission is to educate and assist local health care providers as they improve Liberia’s health care system.
“U.S. physicians from several medical schools, but in particular the University of Chicago, want to help Africa, but they typically don’t know what that entails. So HEARTT prepares them for what to expect and sends them over to JFK ,” Sirleaf says.
HEARTT has been focused on staffing JFK’s emergency department but plans to expand by providing the hospital with pediatricians and surgeons. “All that’s holding us back is the need for more financial and institutional support,” Sirleaf says.
And yes, his mother, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, won the presidency and took office in 2006. She recently published an account of the experience in This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President (Harper, 2009).