A Syrian girl, born with no legs who used limbs fashioned by her father from tin cans to walk, is receiving treatment after photos of her went viral on social media.
Eight-year-old Maya is taking her first steps in Istanbul on prosthetic limbs after photos of her struggling to move around a tent encampment in Idlib surfaced on social media. Maya suffers from a congenital disorder which means she was born without legs – the same disorder endured by her father Mohammed Merhi.
The pair had been living in the countryside of southern Aleppo, but had to flee along with Merhi’s wife and five other children and took refuge in rebel-controlled Idlib, when fighting and clashes broke out. While Maya, like her father, had been able to move around by crawling, a recent surgery further reduced the length of her legs and made this more difficult.
“We faced many challenges, especially moving from the place we lived in tents,” her father told Reuters. “The situation, in general, was difficult. She was unable to walk so we had to create something for her to protect her from the ground,” he said, referring to the improvised legs he designed from tubes and old tins of tuna.
“In order for her to move out of the tent, I had the idea to fix on her limbs tubing stuffed with a spongy material to reduce the pressure,” Merhi continued.
“Then, I added two empty cans of tuna because the plastic was not strong enough to resist the friction with the ground,” Merhi told AFP.
Thanks to her father, Maya was able to walk outside of the tent they were living in, and could even venture out to the school on camp grounds by herself. Merhi has five other children, none of which suffer from this condition.
Merhi told AFP that he replaced the tubing on her makeshift prosthetics once a month and the tins once per week. Her father will also be given prosthetic legs at the Turkish clinic.
“It’s more important that she can walk so that she is autonomous. It would be like a new life for us,” he said. “I dream of seeing her walk, going to school and back without suffering.”
Specialists in Turkey have committed themselves to that goal.
“Maya will walk,” Dr. Mehmet Zeki Culcu, the prosthetics specialist treating her at an Istanbul clinic, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) . “God willing, in three months time.”
According to AFP, the Turkish Red Crescent intervened after photos began circulating online. Maya and her father, who also has no legs, were evacuated from Syria by Turkish authorities and brought to Istanbul.
Culcu told Reuters that Maya’s father’s efforts to help her walk not only inspired his team to get involved, but made their work easier.
“He did everything to make this child walk and God helped them,” Culcu said. “Normally nobody would believe she could walk with these makeshift limbs.”
-With a file from Reuters.