"When you operate on a baby, they feel better, and they actually give you a smile," she says. "And when they go back home, they're always going home smiling. That joy is the best part for me.”
Dr. Martha Mukonka is an alum of Kids Operating Room's paediatric surgical scholarship. Now fully trained and qualified, she works at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia, the country's largest hospital, where three Kids Operating Rooms give surgical teams dedicated spaces to care for children.
Martha grew up in Lusaka, raised by her mother, and knew from an early age that she wanted to work with children. At medical school, she discovered another passion: surgery. Paediatric surgery connected both perfectly.
Through a Kids Operating Room and Smile Train scholarship, Martha completed her specialist training, gaining the skills and experience she needed.
It wasn’t always easy. Training meant balancing long hours in hospital with studying and raising three young children of her own. Some nights brought an altogether different challenge. Like one shift, when five children arrived with surgical emergencies at the same time. With only one operation possible at a time, the team had to triage each child, organise blood supplies and work through the night.
It was experiences like this that prepared Martha for a country where her skills are desperately needed. Zambia has only a small number of paediatric surgeons, serving millions of children.
For Martha, it makes every operation, every child, truly count.
She remembers meeting the mother of a boy she had treated since he was just two weeks old. After several corrective operations, his final procedure was complete. The next time Martha saw his mother, she heard something wonderfully ordinary: he was starting school.
“Children are the future. They’re the future leaders. They’re the ones who’ll be the future surgeons, the future lawyers. If we take care of them now, they’ll soon be the ones to look after us.”
Martha loves nothing more than interacting with her patients, doing rounds and stopping at each bed. She knows every patient, every parent, by name. Each child is treated the same: with Martha doing whatever she can – tickling them, patting their heads, playing with them – to raise a giggle.
Because for Martha, recovery isn’t only about getting a child safely through an operation. It’s about giving them back everything that comes afterwards.
Kids Operating Room makes that possible.
