Conflict amputees want your support rather than your pity

Disabled people don’t want pity. They want the chance to be a complete functioning person again, writes Rym Ghazal

Amputees need heroes who can adopt their cause. Ozan Kose / AFP

Screaming in fear and pain, little Ahmed, only six years old, lost both his legs in an explosion inside a Syrian city. He is being fitted with very basic prosthetic legs, the kind that leave a person mostly immobile. Words can’t capture what he and hundreds of thousands of victims of war must have lost, seen and endured.

I didn’t know about the bleeding, the infections and the pain that occur with ill-fitted and cheap prosthetic limbs, until I saw it in victims like Ahmed.

Our health is the very thing we take for granted. Those who have been unlucky are desperate to walk again, to hold someone, to just move and feel such as a complete human.

There are estimates of between 30,000 to 50,000 amputees from the Syrian war alone, and there have been amputees from other wars in the region. These people struggle to live a normal life.

I recall, back in 2004, a young Iraqi in his teenties, who was part of a bomb disposal squad. He showed no fear as he went to defuse a car bomb. Sadly, it went off. He was the only casualty and lost both of his arms in the process.

As he lay in hospital, he and I overheard his weeping wife commenting to someone outside the door that he was now “half a man”.

He fought back the tears in his eyes as he repeated: “I would have done it again. I saved a neighbourhood. That is what real men do.”

It was many years before he got the more expensive and advanced prosthetic arms that are now available, and it was through donations from the very people he once saved.

There is now talk of a type of 3-D printed prosthetic that could help more than 30 million people worldwide who are in need of prosthetic limbs and braces.

I was reminded of this great humanitarian crisis when I met Dareen Barbar in Dubai. She is a young Lebanese woman who is a hero for all those facing challenges.

She was 15 years old when an aggressive form of bone cancer took over her left leg, leading the doctors to amputate it above the knee.

Now in her thirties, and a mother of two, she is a motivational speaker and a fitness instructor who keeps on challenging herself. Dareen is voice of hope for the amputees. She has proven that anyone with enough determination and faith can overcome whatever obstacles are placed in their way.

“You can’t imagine how painful and difficult the cheaper type of prosthetics are. The good ones are very expensive, with just a high-tech knee costing about Dh90,000,” she told me. A full leg replacement could cost in excess of Dh150,000.

Often such procedures are not covered by health insurance. People forget that prosthetic limbs need regular maintenance and replacements and so many families, especially refugees who can’t even afford food most of the time, cannot possibly afford new prosthetic limbs?

There are several charities working in this field, but the demand is bigger than the supply, and whole programmes are needed to help them with physiotherapy and with counselling and a whole new system to embrace and integrate them into communities.

All the disabled people I have met said repeatedly that they don’t want pity nor do they want people to fear them, avoid them or feel uncomfortable around them. They want that chance to be a complete functioning person again.

The amputees, whoever they may be, need a group of powerful heroes who can adopt their cause, as unfortunately it is a costly venture, but one in which the impact and rewards are immeasurable.

Heroes are made every day, and in the Year of Giving you can become a hero to someone who is waiting for the chance to feel complete again.

On Twitter:@arabianmau