Published: November 19, 2009 The sisters from Bangladesh's Missionaries of Charity were praying when conjoined twins Krishna and Trishna were wheeled into surgery at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital, reports the Daily Telegraph.
"We prayed from 8am to 8pm," Sister Grace from Missionaries of Charity in Bangladesh said. On Tuesday afternoon, the girls who were joined at the head were successfully separated after 32 hours of surgery. The 15 sisters who had a part in raising the girls continued to pray when they heard the news. "I gave the announcement to all the sisters and we prayed," Sister Grace recalled after receiving the good news over the phone from the Melbourne charity Children First Foundation, which had organised the surgery to take place in Australia, the report says.
"For us the prayer is not just for the operation but for the life of the girls." The girls, who are 2 years and 11 months old, were the first conjoined twins at Mother Teresa's Orphanage, which was opened in the capital Dhaka in 1976. Sydney woman Danielle Noble was one of those who took part in the mission to save Krishna and Trishna.
When she first met the twins in January 2007 they were fragile and only a month old. She felt in her heart that something had to be done to save them. She took the first steps to get the girls to Melbourne a year later. "I am just one person in a long chain of people," she said. "This would not have happened with just one single individual, it was a combination of so many people who worked hard to achieve this outcome."
After raising money among Australian expats in Dhaka, Ms Noble found Atom Rahman, an Australian-Bangladeshi who was a representative of the Children First Foundation and is now the girls' co-guardian, along with the founder of CFF Moira Kelly. The twins were given a 25 percent chance of coming through the operation unharmed, with a 50 percent chance they would be brain damaged and a 25 percent chance that one of them would die, the report says. The Herald Sun reports the first brain scans of Trishna and Krishna since they were separated have fuelled hopes the Bangladeshi orphans have come through their marathon operation in good health.
The full results of the scans would be known on Thursday, but guardian Ms Kelly said the tests had gone extremely well.