I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have been doing a project with a lady called Comfort who runs a charity called Mercy Mission. We have been going to some of the local villages within the mine concession to visit people with disabilities, and initially to determine how many people there are with disabilities, what their needs are and essentially what we may be able to do to help them.
Comfort is an interesting person - she was involved in a car accident 30 years ago, and had her leg amputated above the knee. Luckily she had enough money to pay for a prosthetic leg, and went on to have four children of her own (one of which is my friend Sandra). Since then she has been involved in helping people with disabilities on a voluntary basis, and has adopted three other children in Konongo of various ages. When she found out I was a physio she was very keen for me to be involved in a project with her, and I was more than keen to help her out too!
The village visits have been really interesting for me - I've seen some things that I have NEVER seen before! Many of the medical conditions here are no longer seen in western countries, and the people either don't have enough money or transport to get to medical services, or the medical services are sometimes not very good quality. For example, the young man in the photo in the wheelchair is named Emmanuel, 19 years old. When he was young he had some kind of reaction to a vaccination, and after that his legs became paralysed. That was a fairly common story amongst a group of people in the age range of 18 to 25, and all of them have been left with weakness or paralysis of one or both legs. I can only guess that it was an adverse reaction to a polio vaccine, but am not sure.
The young boy Stephen in the photos is about 8 years old, and has club feet bilaterally(you can see his feet are turned inwards). We saw quite a few cases of club foot, but only in two villages (?genetic component). Club foot can usually be corrected quite well when the children are young, but they need to attend a hospital for serial casting every week for a few months. There is actually a free clinic in a nearby town, but obviously this boy's family didn't or couldn't take him there. I hope that we'll still be able to help him - it gets harder to correct as the child gets older and he may need surgery, but hopefully if we can get him to the clinic he can be helped.
The lady in the blue dress walks bent forwards with her hands on the ground (a bit like a monkey!) and has some kind of deformity of her lower back. You can see the thongs on her hands! I have seen this condition before in textbooks but can't remember the name of it (it could be a form of spina bifida) and can't seem to find it on the internet. If anyone happens to know what it is, please let me know. She was a lovely lady, very happy and smiley.
Often people with disabilities struggle to get appropriate equipment and aids - their wheelchairs will have flat or worn out tyres, or they use crutches made from branches or scraps of wood. However sometimes they are quite ingenious, as you can see by the man on his hand cycle. He had his whole leg amputated at the hip after a lorry accident, but now gets around with this contraption which they built in the village using bicycle parts and timber. I think its quite ingenious really, maybe they'll have to patent it!
I have some more interesting photos too and will put them on here soon. Now that we have visited all the villages, the plan is to come up with some ideas of how we can help. That will probably be on both an individual basis (getting treatment for children like Stephen), and some long term strategies like a skills training program (Emmanuel wants to learn to be a shoe-maker), and lobbying to government groups for more funding for people with disabilities. It will be an interesting, and I'm sure a challenging project - but also very rewarding.
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