Sonia’s new arm

By Michael Matza

LASCAHOBAS, Haiti - She awoke before dawn in the one-room shack she shares with four family members and began to dress. She straightened the bandage on the stump of her left arm, donned a denim skirt and white sleeveless blouse and slipped on sandals and pink stud earrings.

Then she walked half a mile up the dirt road to the village centre and squeezed into a cab for the jarring ride to get a new left arm.

“It's a big day for me,'' said Sonia Donatien, 32, anticipating the two-hour trip to the regional hospital where American prosthetists are mending victims of Haiti's earthquake.

''I lost an arm. I am going to replace it.''

Three months ago, her crushed arm was removed in a delicate operation by University of Pennsylvania Health System surgeons on a relief mission. Now, in a matter of hours, she would get the first prosthetic arm delivered in Haiti since the quake.

The January 12 cataclysm devastated much of the country, killed more than 230,000 people and left thousands of victims whose crushed or severed limbs had to be removed.

Handicap International, the French medical group working with the World Health Organisation and the Haitian government to co-ordinate amputee care, puts the number of amputees, including people who lost fingers or toes, at 2000 to 4000; other aid groups say the total is at least 6000.

Derided as kokobe, Creole for “broken body”

Even before the quake, Haiti had an amputee population of about 80,000, almost none of whom had prostheses. In a shattered country where able-bodied people have trouble carrying buckets of water or squeezing through the stalls of jammed outdoor markets, amputees are especially vulnerable. The earthquake destroyed the country's only two prosthetics workshops. Streets here teem with cars and pedestrians. Footpaths are rare, let alone ramps or handicap parking. Often disabled people are beggars and outcasts, derided as kokobe, Creole for ''broken body'', because they cannot find work.

“The stigma is strong,'' said psychologist Luana Forestal, a counsellor for amputees at Haiti's Hospital Albert Schweitzer. For that reason foreign volunteers, using donated materials and expert staff from overseas companies, are trying to introduce First-World prosthetics, physical therapy and enlightened attitudes about public health. The long-term goal is to train local technicians and physical therapists because patients who are given prostheses now will need refitting throughout their lives.

A long way from Louisiana, where her $US8000 ($A9000) Hanger Orthopedic arm was made, Sonia Donatien collected her thoughts on this morning in early April, before what felt to her almost like an introduction to a part of her body, a new arm.

''It is a grace from God,'' she said, setting out from her small farming and trading community.

''And by God's grace I lost just one arm. Some people lost arms and legs.''

—The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 18, 2010