By Umaru Fofana
Sierra Leone is a country full of contradictions and hypocrisy. We profess to love dogs but we are despicably cruel to man’s best friend. We leave them out in the rain and feed them on the dirty sandy floor. We let them go for months without bathing them.
We say women are our mothers and chatter all day about how we love them or how they make us happy. Yet we treat them disrespectfully and even scornfully. We even dehumanize them and subjugate them to the backburner at home and in decision-making in public.
Husbands disrespect their wives while boyfriends show love for their girlfriends only for sex. Men say girls are the love of their fathers, yet they rape these minors. Women say their children bring them joy and show them love and empathy, yet they treat other people’s children with morbid disdain and wish the best only for their own.
We have in our default setting discriminatory tendencies towards people living with disabilities, never mind the lip service we pay to them. We make them double victims both by our action and inaction. And the government is the biggest culprit!
In all this, there are, obviously, exceptions. But I bet we can count them on our fingers.
My wife and I spend about one-third of our meagre income on helping people who are not of our blood relations. They are mostly children – and some adults – who want to have an education but cannot afford it. We don’t talk about it because that is what our faiths (she is Catholic and I am Muslim) dictate.
But with her consent I have decided to talk about this one help we rendered to a child who otherwise could have been dead by now, because this story brings to the fore so many things that are wrong with our society; so much so that opportunities are taken away from some people simply because of their disability. In as much the same way as citizenship by birth is taken away from people born in our country simply because of the colour of their skin.
On the eve of Ramadan 2020, I was driving from a film shoot in Makeni, northern Sierra Leone. I had also taken some Ifthar for my parents ahead of the month of fasting. The country was in a partial lockdown due to the Covid19 pandemic. I stopped in a village on the main road to buy some local stuff. I also wanted to give some foodstuff to some needy people.
On this day I saw Abdul Karim Kabia, aged 7, holding his left hand with his right. It was bandaged with sticks and cloth as the flesh around his elbow was rotting. He looked cheerful when I first saw him. He’d just run and arrived close to me, gasping for breath. Also probably gasping for money, hoping I would give him some cash to feed on that day. As he tried his tricks, he sent an infectious smile, beaming like a child who’d just had a full square meal for the first time in a long time. But beneath that veneer and the infectiousness of his smile, belay pain, anguish and poverty. Children have the power of stoicism that adults can only dream of. This was a boy at death’s door.
As I often try to do when I see someone in need, I called the boy while I waited for the village women to prepare what I had stopped to buy. I tried to find out what had gone wrong with his hand. He said, casually and chattily, that he had fallen from a tree and broken a bone in his biceps. As I looked empathetic, he giggled as if wondering “what does this man think is wrong with me?” We would later be told that he had only a few days to live.
As the women came to attend to me, I asked them about the boy to know the whereabouts of his parents. “His mother died a few years ago”, I was told. “His father abandoned him and has not been seen for a long while”, they went on.
“Who looks after him then?” I queried. “His grandmother”, they said. I asked why she had not taken the boy to hospital since he fell. The women laughed. I wondered why. They said the old lady could not even afford what to eat let alone take her grandson to hospital.
I insisted on seeing the grandma. The residents of Lasoso in the Marampa chiefdom, a village between Magballay Bridge and Rogbere Junction, were then gathering around me. I insisted that I wanted to see the grandma. Soon, she would walk towards me from a mud house, barefoot. Then the extent of the poverty the villagers were talking about dawned on me.
I brought out my business card and gave it to the grandma. As I also did transport fare. I asked her to go to the Mabessenneh Catholic hospital in Lunsar the following morning and present my card to the authorities, with the guarantee that I would foot the bill. I did not want to give them money for hospitalization for fear it would be converted to something else by a family who had many competing priorities. I then asked a young man in the village to accompany them.
Just after 07:00 the following day, a Monday, I received a call from them that they’d arrived there at Mabessenneh. Clearly you could tell they were serious about treating Abdul Karim all those weeks since he fell from the tree but could just not afford it.
I spoke to the hospital manager, Brother Michael, who proriotised Abdul Karim’s situation and immediately referred him to the senior doctors there. Not long after, I received a call that the poor boy would have to have his arm amputated otherwise the infection which had spread like the metastasis of cancer, would get into his organs. He would die.
After some consultations with the family, it was agreed to save Karim’s life. His left arm was amputated, right up to the tip of his shoulder. That’s how far the infection had gone. Some two weeks later I went to visit him at the hospital. He was sleeping. When he woke up and saw me, he sprang from his hospital bed and hugged me with the one remaining arm. I almost shed tears.
The hospital was very gracious and kind to write off the bill. Soon I started thinking about his new life. Returning to his village would blight the future of an already disadvantaged boy. Not only would the lack of facilities mean he would sink further into poverty and possibly face an early death, he would also be taunted and sent to do those hard jobs he had been subjected to, regardless of his present condition.
That was when I came face-to-face with the harsh reality of the lack of public-owned special needs facilities in Sierra Leone. I contacted SOS Children’s Village. The Senegalese head of the institution was tremendously helpful. But there was a limit to what she could do for me and my now new son. Their classroom doors were flung open widely to the boy. But the snag was that they had closed their care for disabled children so they could not take him into their lovely home. However, they were happy to let one of their partners provide shelter for him while he was allowed into the school.
But the partner organisation that would shelter him was all the way in the east end of town. Commuting from there to the SOS School in the west was impossible. That organisation is on financial dire straits. It was also difficult to do so from our residence. Schools were preparing to reopen after they had been closed to stem the spread of Covid19. Time was running out for Karim. Our concern became a worry. Whenever I called to talk to Karim in Lunsar where he was with his aunt– we had decided against taking him back to the village – he would ask when he was due to start schooling. I had no answer for him, sadly.
In the end the Cheshire Home was suggested. Until then I did not know that they also operated a school, together with their home. Dr ABS Dumbuya, one of my favourite Sierra Leoneans who heads the Home and also runs his Dorothy Springer Trust for people with disabilities, was tremendously helpful. We did all the paperwork and completed the medical. We are excited that Karim entered the Home over the weekend and started school this week.
While we are excited that Karim has had a second chance in life, there are hundreds – possibly thousands – of children living with disabilities out there with no chance or opportunity to make it in life. Even for the few who manage to get to special needs schools, the institutions go for several months without their subvention from the state. Clearly, a nation’s seriousness about progress is measured by the way it treats its vulnerable: women, children and people living with disabilities. Surely we are yet a very long way away from getting serious as a nation. Join me wish Abdul Karim and all children in his situation, ALL THE BEST.
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