Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Tomorrow, Mrs Rainy Day and seven of her colleagues from the German Heart Centre in Munich head off to Tanzania. During their fourteen-day operating tour, they'll perform open-heart surgery on patients with congenital cardiac problems such as aortic valve defects and rheumatic mitral valves. All this will be taking place at the Tanzania Heart Institute in Dar es Salaam, which was founded by Ferdinand Masau, a cardiovascular surgeon, who trained at the Texas Medical Centre in Houston under the world-famous heart specialist, Denton Cooley.

"Our long-term goal is to train a Tanzanian cardiac team so that they can carry out heart surgery independently," said Mrs Rainy Day in the course of an exclusive interview. "In the short-term, we're bringing lots of medical supplies and equipment with us so that we'll be able to operate round the clock, starting Monday."

Heading up the Munich team in Dar es Salaam is Gregory Eising, a surgeon who performed the first open-heart operation in the history of Tanzania two years ago. Until that point, the procedure was unknown in that part of the Swahili-speaking world but that very flexible language responded instantly and created upasuaji ya moyo, meaning "heart operation". So, here's to a fortnight of successful operating and hats off to a group of very dedicated people who are volunteering their time and skills to help the needy of East Africa. We look forward to progress reports.