Tot inspires good Samaritans
With help from community, sick Kosovo boy gets care
Members of the Greater Boston Albanian community gathered yesterday in support of a 2 1⁄2-year-old boy from Kosovo who needs heart surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The Kosovo Association of Boston and Massachusetts Albanian American Society held a fundraiser to benefit Rubin Gashi, an ethnic Albanian, and his family at Alba restaurant in Quincy.
Gashi suffers from Kawasaki disease, a children’s illness also known as mucocutaneous lymph node syndrome that left him with heart complications and life-threatening bleeding, and his family was unable to get him proper care at home. His free medical treatment at Boston Children’s Hospital was coordinated through Gift of Life International, which helps children with heart defects in developing countries.
“It takes almost two years to get through this program for all these kids who cannot get the surgery in Kosovo or southeastern Europe,” said Isuf Restelica, a Kosovo Association of Boston volunteer. “Kosovo has been one of the poorest countries in Europe because of the war between Kosovo and Serbia, and they’re struggling with the health system there.”
Rubin and his parents have been in Massachusetts for a month and will stay until March 2. An initial $6,777 raised online — to help pay for the family’s airfare, housing, groceries and transportation for medical appointments — is nearly exhausted.
“And it looks like he will have to come back, because the doctors said he is still too young to do the surgery,” Restelica said.
Through an interpreter yesterday at the fundraiser, Rubin’s father, Bujar Gashi, a 33-year-old IT worker in Kosovo, wanted to publicly thank those rallying around his family. Gashi and his wife used to administer their son’s daily injections, he said, but Boston Children’s Hospital doctors are switching the treatment to oral medication. While Rubin looks like a “normal kid,” his activities are restricted, and he’s unable to participate in heavy sports or risk a cut or wound.
Leo Keka, the Albanian owner of Alba, opened his heart and restaurant to the cause yesterday, which, with food, music and dancers in traditional dress, turned into an Albanian cultural celebration that he hoped would raise $10,000.
“I got involved because I just felt so bad for the little boy,” said Keka, who escaped then-Communist Albania in 1989 and landed in the United States in 1990 as a political refugee at age 21. Keka got his start in restaurants from the late Anthony Athanas, the Albanian-American owner of the former Anthony’s Pier 4 in Boston, where Keka was a dishwasher, busboy and waiter.
“I always like to help where I come from,” Keka said. “I visit the country a lot. I’m as American as American can be, but I love my country. I feel like when I needed the help, people were there for me.”