Refer a child for Surgery

* MKI has surgical teams (composed of surgeons, techs, nurses and

volunteers) and flies to local hospitals. 

Mending Kids International provides life-changing surgical care to children worldwide. Over the years, thousands of children have received corrective,transformational surgeries that have given them another chance at a longer, healthier life.

Most of the surgeries performed are for congenital heart defects, rthopedic abnormalities, severe scoliosis and significant cranial facial deformities. MKI has provided surgeries to hundreds of children from all over the globe.

Please share this information to friends and families so that the news reach families in need of the surgery. See instruction below.

Birhanu's Story

Birhanu Haptu was seven years old when Mending Kids International brought him from his tiny village in Ethiopia to America.  He was a little boy with severe scoliosis deformities –– so severe that if not treated, they would cut his life short by stunting his growth and slowly crushing his lungs.  He was greeted at the airport by Jim and Caroline Nicol, the host family who would, over time, change the course of the small boy’s life.

With Mending Kids spearheading all of the medical, travel and legal details, and providing funding for all of his surgeries with donations, Birhanu was soon under the care of renowned surgeons at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. After a series of complex surgeries that straightened his severely curved spine and corrected a hand deformity, Birhanu emerged a changed boy –– a boy who could look others in the eye as an equal, one who now had hope.

Months of surgeries and recovery later, Birhanu returned to Ethiopia.  But as an orphan, his future was bleak. His parents were deceased and he didn’t have access to an education.  Jim and Caroline’s own biological children were nearing adulthood, and they could not turn away from the feeling that they had to travel to Ethiopia to adopt Birhanu, and make him their son.  And that, they did.

Birhanu joined his new family in 2010 –– a boy in good health, a boy with a family, a boy with a bright future.

Refer a child

If you have a child (under the age of 16) currently living outside of the United States and needs corrective surgical treatment, please complete and submit to us the following information described below. We only accept children with serious surgical conditions that can be corrected with surgery (for example: heart surgery, orthopedic surgery, cranial facial surgery, etc). Please make sure you have a written surgical recommendation from the child’s doctor prior to applying.

It is outside the current scope of our mission to accept children with chronic conditions such as cancer, those with multiple disabilities, syndromes, or those in need of an organ transplants.

It is important that the whole package be complete BEFORE it is submitted. Our Child Selection Committee meets every 2 weeks to determine eligibility and we try to accommodate as many children as we can. Incomplete applications cannot be reviewed.

Please complete the entire application as directed and return to our Burbank office location for consideration

For more go to the mendingKids.