Anita Rachman

Bilqis Anindya Passa in the arms of her mother Dewi Farida, watching coin contributions from the public being counted in Jakarta. (JG Photo/ Afriadi Hikmal)

Facebookers, Others Give Rp 1b for Toddler’s Surgery

After Facebook members and donors from the street raised more than the Rp 1 billion ($106,000) needed for a 17-month-old Indonesian girl’s liver transplant, the government has said it will pay for the procedure.

Bilqis Anindya Passa suffers from a rare condition known as biliary atresia, which is caused by a stumped bile duct. A liver transplant is the only way to treat the condition, but her parents couldn’t afford the surgery.

Her cause rallied Facebook users to join the Bilqis Love Coins group, dedicated to fund-raising via the collection of coins.

The group has so far accrued 98,000 members and raised Rp 1.5 billion for the toddler in the form of coins, cash donations and bank transfers, and at donation centers in Jakarta, Bogor, Bandung, Aceh, and Palu, Central Sulawesi.

“Indeed, the Facebook group made the greatest impact on this fund-raising effort,” said Citra, Bilqis’ aunt. “We have the money now. The decision of how and when [the surgery will take place] will be made on Tuesday [today].”

But on Monday, Usman Sumantri, the Health Ministry’s head of health insurance financing, told the Jakarta Globe that the ministry will pay for the entire operation, including the pre- and post-operative stages. “Yes, we will cover all the expenses,” he said in a telephone interview.

Citra said the Ministry of Health had once promised that the government would cover all the surgery, but “we don’t know yet whether they would really pay it. But the hospital has so far not charged us anything.”

Bilqis needs to be intensively treated for about three months following the surgery. “And she should take medicine for the rest of her life,” Citra said.

Citra said that if the ministry did pay all the expenses, the family would use the money to set up a foundation to help other children with similar conditions.

Accompanied by her parents and grandparents, Bilqis has been undergoing medical treatment at the state-run Kariadi Hospital in Semarang, Central Java, since Wednesday.

Last year a Facebook group collected hundreds of millions of rupiah — in the form of coins — to rescue Prita Mulyasari, a mother of two who had been ordered to pay Rp 204 million in damages to Omni International Hospital over a defamation lawsuit. Thousands of people collected more than Rp 650 million in coins, three times more than the ordered settlement.

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