Non-Profits | Editorial & Humanitarian Photographer, Heber Vega.

February 13, 2010 by heber vega

Preemptive Love?

[February 13, 2010] In my home country, Chile, I had the opportunity to collaborate in a couple of social programs. Most of them were geared towards youth, so it wasn’t until I got to Iraq that I started to understand the entire world surrounding humanitarian organizations and NGOs. In the past 7 years I’ve seen a myriad of organizations amble through Iraq, some of them with good intentions but no expertise, some of them with a lot of money but poor implementation of their programs, others yet looking for a way to make money; but I have also found organizations doing a good job, honoring the humanitarian field. With those organizations, I also have learned that their good results, most of the time, are due to a really smart, really committed person.
A couple of years ago I had the honor of meeting Jeremy Courtney, one of these exceptional people. He is a talented musician, videographer, relief worker, good father and better friend. After just one year of being here, Jeremy realized and identified one of the most common health problems among children in Iraq, heart disease. In the beginning, he worked in conjunction with the organization that I work for, getting these children out of Iraq for heart surgeries. In Iraq we don’t have the surgical infrastructure for those kinds of surgeries.
Later Jeremy saw the opportunity to expand this initiative way beyond anybody’s imagination. He created his own organization, selling the typical Kurdish shoes to people back in America, as a way of raising funds. Today that organization has grown exponentially and it doesn’t belong just to Jeremy anymore, but to several dozens of contributors from all around the world. What was once called, “Buy Shoes Save Lives,” is now known as the “Preemptive Love Coalition;” A mature and vision-driven organization. PLC, as we call it here in Iraq, is now able to send dozens of Iraqi children to Turkey every year for heart surgeries. Who said that a simple person couldn’t change the world?

Today I’m talking about this organization because I am blessed to be able to shoot for PLC whenever our schedules match up. This is just the first post of several more that I hope I can use to share about my work for PLC. In this, the first post, I wanted to show the first photo shoot that I did for PLC this month.

After Jeremy talked to me about shooting photos for PLC, he invited me to spend a day in Kaladze, a small Kurdish town in northern Iraq. He wanted me to shoot photos of some of the children that PLC has been working with. The following shots belongs to Shwan and his family, a 10-year-old boy that received a heart surgery last year. Now, thanks to that surgery, he is able to have a better and more normal life.

PLC Staff talking to Shwan’s dad about his recovery and new life.

The moment in which PLC staff has asked Shwan about things he couldn’t do before surgery, but he can do now.

A Portrait of Shwan…