14/10/2026
At eight years old, Moira Kelly made a decision that would take her thousands of miles from home and eventually bring two little girls from Bangladesh into her family.
She had watched a documentary about Mother Teresa, the nun who cared for people living in the streets of Calcutta. When the program ended, Moira turned to her mother and said she wanted to work with the nun one day.
It was the kind of declaration a child might forget by the following week.
Moira did not forget.
Growing up in Melbourne, she kept looking for ways to help children who had been left behind. Her path took her through work as a special education assistant and eventually into humanitarian service. When she decided to travel to India, she sold her car to pay for the airfare.
She was about 21 when she joined Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta.
There, the work was no longer something she watched on a screen. It meant caring for people whose suffering could not be solved with a comforting speech or a few hours of attention. It meant staying when someone was dying and helping when there was no guarantee that help would be enough.
The experience gave her a principle that would shape the rest of her life:
“Wherever there is the greatest evil, the greatest good can be achieved.”
Moira carried that belief into places where children were growing up amid poverty, addiction, disease and war. She worked in South Africa, cared for drug-affected babies in New York, served in Romanian orphanages and helped people caught in the violence of the Balkans.
Then, in 1993, she encountered a problem that would change the direction of her work.
In Bosnia, she met a severely injured boy and his desperate mother. His condition required medical treatment that was beyond what the local circumstances could provide. The boy needed specialist care, and the war had made access to it extraordinarily difficult.
Moira could have offered sympathy and moved on to the next emergency.
Instead, she began making calls.
She sought help from doctors in Australia, worked through the complicated arrangements required to transport a sick child across international borders and appealed to people who could provide medical treatment. Each part of the journey depended on someone else agreeing to help.
Eventually, the boy reached Australia.
For Moira, that rescue became a model for what could be done again. If a child could not receive the operation needed to survive at home, perhaps a network of doctors, hospitals, donors and volunteers could bring that child somewhere treatment was possible.
She began organising more medical evacuations, often relying on personal contacts and whatever resources she could find.
In 1999, she established the Children First Foundation to give the work a lasting structure.
Two years later, with support from Rotary and other volunteers, a property near Kilmore in Victoria became a place where children could stay while receiving treatment and recovering from major operations. The house offered something that hospitals alone could not: a temporary home for children far from their families, surrounded by people who could help them through the long days of rehabilitation.
Children arrived with heart conditions, tumours, cleft palates and injuries that had gone untreated for years. Surgeons donated their expertise. Volunteers helped with daily care. Families who had never met these children made room for them.
Moira had spent years arranging journeys that seemed almost impossible. Now she had somewhere to bring the children when those journeys succeeded.
But one of the most extraordinary cases began not in a war zone, but in an orphanage in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
In 2007, an Australian aid worker visiting the orphanage found two baby girls lying in a cot. They were joined at the top of their heads, sharing brain tissue and blood vessels.
Their names were Trishna and Krishna.
Their birth mother, Lovely Mollick, had been unable to provide the specialist care her daughters needed. The girls were brought to the orphanage, where their future depended on whether someone could find a way to treat them.
The aid worker contacted Moira.
Moira contacted the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.
Soon, the twins were on their way to Australia.
Their arrival did not mean the danger had passed. Separating children joined at the head is an extraordinarily complex operation, particularly when their brains and blood vessels are connected. The surgeons first had to understand precisely how the girls’ circulation worked and prepare their bodies for a procedure that could not safely be rushed.
Over the next two years, specialists carried out a series of operations to redirect shared blood flow and prepare enough tissue to reconstruct the girls’ heads after separation. Tissue expanders helped create the additional skin required for the final operation.
Every stage had to be carefully planned. A complication could threaten both children.
On November 17, 2009, the final separation began at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital.
A team of 16 medical professionals worked through an operation that lasted approximately 30 hours. Neurosurgeon Wirginia Maixner led the surgical effort, alongside specialists who had spent months preparing for this moment.
The work was painstaking. The girls had shared blood vessels and brain tissue, and the surgeons needed to separate them while preserving as much healthy function as possible.
Outside the operating theatre, Moira could do nothing but wait.
For years, she had been the person making the calls, arranging transport and finding someone willing to take the next step. This time, the future of the children she had brought across the world rested in the hands of the surgical team.
When the separation was accomplished, there was still a long recovery ahead.
The hospital announced that the girls had been successfully separated, but the medical team knew that surviving the operation was only the beginning. The twins required intensive monitoring and further reconstructive care.
Then came the news everyone had been waiting for: both girls were recovering.
Five weeks after the operation, Trishna and Krishna were discharged from hospital into Moira’s care. They were using walking aids and were able to celebrate their third birthday at home.
Their birth mother, Lovely Mollick, was able to hear that her daughters had survived the operation and were beginning a new chapter.
“I can't express how I am feeling,” she said.
“I pray for them; may God bless them. Happy birthday.”
For Moira, the girls were not simply the conclusion to a remarkable medical rescue. They became part of her family, a relationship that continued beyond the hospital and the operating theatre.
The eight-year-old who had once watched a documentary about Mother Teresa had spent her adult life moving towards children whose circumstances seemed impossible. Sometimes she found doctors. Sometimes she found money, transport or a temporary home. Sometimes she simply found the next person willing to help.
And sometimes, after all the phone calls and years of medical preparation, she found herself waiting outside an operating theatre for two little girls to receive the chance to live separate lives.
The childhood promise had never been about becoming famous or being remembered.
It had been about making sure a child was not abandoned simply because helping them was difficult.
Years later, two girls who had entered the world joined at the head had a home, a future and someone waiting to take them there.
The promise that began with a child watching a documentary had become a family.
