The disabled who live in poor countries count for very
little and yet there are so many of them.
The poor have a much greater chance to suffer disability as mothers
rarely receive appropriate prenatal care or suffer difficult births without
help, or for other reasons such as malnutrition, poliomyelitis or accidents. It’s difficult enough to live in a poor
country but very much more so if you have a disability.
Cerebral paralysis is common in Ethiopia due to lack of
prenatal care and infections. As
if the disability alone is not enough and due to the general lack of education,
this disability carries the stigma that people believe it is a sign of bad
luck, that it is the hand of god acting against the family.
Through Dagem we are managing to break these taboos, he is
accepted at the school and has enriched the lives of those in the nursery and
the whole school. In these photos
you can see him meeting Laura again, our wonderful Occupational Therapist
volunteer who facilitated Dagem’s incorporation into the school by teaching
Nuria, his daily Ethiopia care, and his mother how to care for him. Dagem recognised her, lifting his head
and giving her a big smile.
In the last photo we see Jonas, the little boy with the
eternal smile, who suffers from the same condition but in a much milder
form. Laura is applying a
thermoplastic support to his hand.
Hopefully, as we continue to fight the taboos, we’ll see more such
children in Abugida in the future.
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