In 1985, a young lady writer penned an article for the Washingtonian about a man who had died that very day. Titled "Like Something the Lord Made" the aricle would become the most important piece in her life's work.


Vivien Thomas
Her account was about a black carpenter name Vivien Thomas who had died on the very same day she wrote her article. Vivien Thomas was born in 1910 in racially segregated Louisiana, was grandson of a slave, and married with two daughters.

In 1930, Vivien Thomas was black, nineteen years old, a carpenter's apprentice, having completed High School with sights set on Tennessee State College and hopefully medical school. But the Depression wiped out his savings forcing him to postpone college. He secured a job as a laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University to clean the cages and feed the laboratory dogs.

Within 3 days, Vivien Thomas was performing almost as if he'd been born for the lab, doing arterial punctures on the laboratory dogs and measuring and administering anesthesia; a month later it was delicate and complex operations. Dr Blalock was astounded by Thomas' remarkable intellectual acumen and manual dexterity, and Thomas rapidly became indispensable as a research partner to Blalock forays into heart surgery.

In 1943, Blalock was approached by renowned pediatric cardiologist who was seeking a surgical solution to a complex and fatal four-part heart anomaly called blue baby syndrome. Thomas was charged with the task of first creating a blue baby-like condition in a dog, and then correcting the condition. Thomas demonstrated that the corrective procedure was not lethal, thus persuading Blalock that the operation could be safely attempted on a human patient

On November 29, 1944 when the procedure was first tried on an eighteen-month-old infant, because no instruments for cardiac surgery existed, Thomas adapted the needles and clamps for the procedure from those he used in the animal lab. During the surgery itself, at Blalock's request, he stood on a step stool behind Blalock and coached him step by step through the proceure. You see Thomas had performed the operation hundreds of times on a dog, as compared to the Dr Blalock who'd done it only once, as Thomas' assistant. It was the first ever open heart surgery.

They ended up working together for 34 years. Although Vivien Thomas received little public acclaim, to the host of young surgeons Thomas came to train in the 1940s, he became a figure of legend. In 1968, the surgeons Thomas trained — who had then become chiefs of surgical departments throughout America — commissioned the painting of his portrait in John Hopkins University. In 1976, John Hopkins University awarded Thomas a honorary doctorate.


Black Biography:Vivien Thomas

@All very inspiring bios - learnt alot so far.
Ever wonder what it'd be like if you met Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King before they were famous, would you really get it? Sad to say I met Ms. Ingrid Munro as a young man, she needed my help, and I bangled it up...


Ingrid Munro

Ms.Ingrid Munro's father was a missionary and medical doctor in Rhodesia. Swedish by birth, she was trained as an architect and urban planner. After graduate school she first worked for the Swedish bureau of housing research, then in Kenya for UN Habitat before becoming the head of the Africa Housing Fund.

In 1988, Ms. Munro and her husband Bob, adopted first 1 boy who lived on the streets in Nairobi, then later his 2 brothers. Munro's relationship with the mothers of her sons' friends - women who were beggars - grew.

On the day she retired from AHF in 1999, 50 women beggars with whom she'd worked, showed up at her front door and pleaded for her help. Determined to help the community where her sons were born, she started Jamii Bora.

Jamii Bora Trust has over 170,000 members across Kenya, and now provides health and life insurance, business education and housing loans to its members. The average loan is for Kes 7,500/= only. All Jamii Bora staffers are members or graduated members. Many are former prostitutes and beggars themselves; all of them know what it is to suffer.

"There is nobody I have come across who wants to stay in the slums, nobody." So in Jan 2009, Jamii Bora did the unbelievable! The first 246 families moved out of the slums and into the newly created Kaputiei town with nearly 1,800 families to follow.


Ms.Ingrid Munro has received four Nobel Peace Prize nominations.
"There is no country in the world that has raised itself out of poverty through charity. What we offer to Jamii Bora members is access to a ladder that they can climb up to take themselves out of poverty. But the climbing they must do themselves."