Miracle boat brings mobility aids
Published: April 11, 2006
Its population of 750,000 people survive mainly on farming but, remote from the mainland, it’s hard to earn a decent livelihood.
Local health workers have recommended Frankie Villarin for an artificial limb, but the team must assess him themselves both physically and mentally.
It’s not an easy task, as he lives a half-mile trek through the forest from the nearest road.
Once he’s deemed suitable, they take a plaster cast moulding of his stump which they will take back to the boat to model his new artificial leg from.
Now he’s mobile, Frankie’s prospects are much brighter. He can go into the town to find a job and then he hopes to find a wife.
With no legs, Michelle Aplacador is recommended for a wheelchair.
And because she also has only one arm, it will have to be a one-hand drive model, designed especially for her.
At £80 it costs more than her family earns in a month. It is good news for them. Up until now, they have had to carry Michelle on their back.
One patient who they see, Jose Mijares, lost his leg as the result of a gash to his foot while he was cutting down coconuts.
Going to town to see a doctor in town would have cost Jose a week’s wages, so he didn’t go.
He treated himself with herbal plants, but the wound turned septic and eventually he had to borrow money from family and friends for a costly amputation.
With no money left, he had to find a way to carry on working to feed his nine children.
He has been ploughing the fields with a makeshift leg made of bamboo.
The team are able to fit him with a prosthetic limb, so he can plough the fields in comfort, and at twice the speed.
‘More than mobility’
The team also try to educate people in outlying villages about disability, as superstition and misbelief about the causes are rife.
Disabled family members are hidden away in the belief that they have brought shame on the family.
In one village, the team find Alan, a 30-year-old blind man who is unable to walk, not due to disability, but because he has been kept in one room by his mother.
By the end of their campaign, the Hilwai team have helped 69 people in villages all over Masbate to become mobile.
But they hope that they have given them a lot more than mobility, as Ben Gobin explains.
“I think what is important for us is not that we have left prosthetics or a wheelchair.
“What we hope we have left is self confidence for the people to go on with their life, and the means to make their own choice.
“It’s really up to them and what we want to do is to give them the capacity to get a choice in life.”
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