UK Mercy Mission here

Jai Lameer, a London resident originally from Sri Lanka is here again on his eight Mercy Mission from UK. He has accompanied a team of doctors from Guy's Paediatric Cardiac Surgery Hospital in London who arrived in Sri Lanka on September 10. The team will be in Sri Lanka until September 19 carrying out operations at the Karapitiya Hospital, Galle.

The team last year conducted 18 operations in six days and surpassed the 100 mark finishing up in a grand total of 104 out of which 84 are living.

Children's referred from Lady Ridgeway Children Hospital, Colombo will be entered into the wards for the operations.

This year Mercy Mission are planning to donate five anaesthetic machines to the Karapitiya Hospital at a cost of over Rs 100 million. The machines will be shipped next month.

Mercy Mission began as a result of camaraderie which sprung up between Jai Lameer and his doctor in the UK, Conal Austin after he performed a heart by-pass operation on Jai in December 2000.

The desire to carry out operations on children in Sri Lanka voiced by Dr Austin blossomed into the Mercy Mission which has operated on 86 children and seen over a thousand since 2002. The mission which started off in Colombo is now conducted in the Karapitiya Hospital in Galle.

The children can be between seven or nine years with conditions that are normally treated when they are infants.

The team has stated that they see a lot more advanced cases in Sri Lanka than in the UK. The team has accepted that there are higher risks involved.

"Funding the mission all these years had its challenges," said Jai Lameer, trustee and coordinator of the mission.

"My wife and I, and part of the family did help quite a bit at the beginning. But things have changed a lot since we have proved ourselves over the years," he said. More details www.mercymission.co.uk