Salum Hamid Juma has a huge smile on his face as he runs around the yard with the younger children. The 13-year-old from Zanzibar is on his second trip to Israel. Three years ago, the Israeli organization "Save a Child's Heart" (SACH) brought Salum to Israel for a life-saving heart operation, and he is back for follow-up surgery.

Salum, who was born with a heart defect, was unable to receive proper treatment in Africa. Through SACH, Salum came to Israel to receive free medical care. He is now able to run and play like any other normal child.

Since its beginning, SACH has saved over 1,600 lives of children from all over the developing world: the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Africa, and Asia, according to Professor Arie Schachner, the International Vice President of SACH and founder of Cardiothoracic Department in Wolfson Hospital.

Each year, SACH performs around 200 operations. Each surgery, performed for free by SACH, costs around $10,000. The medical team, based in Wolfson Hospital of Holon, Israel, can boast a success rate of 96 percent.

Schachner fondly remembers a two-year-old Nigerian boy who had trouble running because of his heart defect. He wanted to run and play but always had shortness of breath and had to squat when he ran, and his lips were blue.

"After the surgery, his lips became red, and when we showed him the mirror he smiled because he looked like a little clown with his bright red lips," Schachner says, smiling. After the surgery, he ran without squatting. Shaking his head and laughing, Schachner says, "He made a mess out of my office but for me it was a sign from God - he was so active and I saw health radiating from him."

"SACH was co-founded with the idea that in this world there is a kind of unjustified situation," says Schachner. "On the one hand, there is an advanced world with everything, and on the other hand, there are developing countries struggling for existence and on top of that they can?t find remedies for health problems."

Salum, like many of the children brought for surgery, came without parents due to financial restrictions. "Can you imagine the impact on the children, without their parents, undergoing heart surgery?" asks Schachner.

"These children are grown up because of their disease."

To help the children cope, Schachner hired an art therapist for activities such as art, painting, photography, and dancing. "The children express themselves and art helps the kids overcome fears and hesitations and makes them ready for the treatment," Schachner says.

During the entire treatment period, the children live in a house near the hospital. Laura Kafif, the housemother of SACH, nurses and volunteers from all over the globe watch over the children and give them a sense of home.

Kafif vividly remembers Raya, a 13-year-old girl from Zanzibar. "Raya barely moved, she was very purple and fragile and it really looked like this was it, like she got here just in time," Kafif says. Raya went straight from the airport to the ICU. "After the surgery she was like a new girl," Kafif says, with amazement in her deep blue eyes. "There was a change in her color, her skin, how well she looked."

Ariel Pulver, a 20-year-old from Canada, volunteered in the SACH house this past summer. During her time there, she watched the surgery of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, Khalid. "I will never forget the moments in which I brought Khalid and his father down to the surgical floor of the hospital, the stressful parting when he had to leave his father, and when I comforted him in the cold and sterile operating room before his anesthetization," Pulver says.

"What followed was beautiful. Next to the surgeons' industrious hands, I saw Khalid's enormous heart beating, his fragile heart stop beating, his weak heart opened, his sick heart repaired and his new strong heart beat again," she says.

"Through the blood tests, the finger-painting, the long hours waiting in the hospital, splashing in the kiddie-pool, the painful surgeries and the quick and sometimes not-so-quick recoveries, each child from ages seven months to 19 years, taught me compassion, love, strength and patience," says Pulver.

Schachner says he receives unbelievable feedback from parents - especially from Palestinians, many who come with fear, hesitation, and little trust. "But the word is spreading about our qualifications," Schachner says with a big smile.

Schachner remembers in particular one mother from the Palestinian Territories. "She came with a lot of hate and prejudice, but now she knows our humanitarian mission and salutes to it and spreads the word," he says.

Kafif stresses that SACH is a non-governmental, non-political and non-religious organization. "In the end, however, it does help with conceptions of Israel - Iraqis are scared but when they come and see [Israel] is not the way they've been told, it helps to build bridges," Kafif says.

Most of the children treated by SACH are Palestinian. Schachner says that "when [the peace process] is in a disaster, SACH is the only thing moving forward - it is active all the time and paves the way to peace."

"It's a bridge-building activity; it does more than 1,000 diplomats working full time," Schachner said in a SACH special on Israeli TV. He explains that when a child from the PA is operated on, the whole village knows about it, and then questions are asked: can it not be better to have good relations and work to benefit humanity instead of destroying each other?

"Too often we ignore the humanity existing within and between our conflicting groups and focus exclusively on what divides us - checkpoints, sanctions, bombings and borders," Pulver remarks. "Thankfully, arbitrary struggles such as those are ignored for the health of children. As an Israeli organization, SACH representatively prioritizes life over seemingly immutable political tensions," Pulver says.

The SACH philosophy, according to Schachner, is "not just to operate on the children, because there are millions of children with congenital heart disease and you can't save them all, but also the second arm of SACH is to educate." SACH brings physicians from developing countries as fellows, nurses, and technicians, to educate them. "We give them tools so they can learn and be self contained and operate on people," Schachner says.

During medical missions to the developing countries, the doctors also follow up on children previously involved with SACH. Schachner describes the emotional response he receives from the parents. "The way they accept our delegation, the families are singing and dancing, waiting for us and great us with 'Shalom,'" Schachner says.

Schachner believes that SACH helps bring hope to families in these developing nations. "We all know what it does to the families with children who have this heart disease - they're struggling for survival and they have to deal with the disease also," Schachner said. "When their child comes back from Israel safely, hope is growing for a better life."