Catching hold of a dream

Fatima is another one of our young Syrian heroes. She was not yet a teenager when she lost both of her hands in an explosion in the house she shared with her mother during the early days of the revolution in her Syrian homeland. Fatima’s mother, Nafla, had lost her husband when she was pregnant with her only child so they were all the family each of them had.

Neither of them remembers much about the blast except that Fatima was playing in her bedroom when it happened and her mother had just said goodbye to some guests who had come over for tea. The explosion happened suddenly and shook the entire house. In the chaos and confusion that followed all Nafla is able to remember is that she grabbed her bleeding daughter and ran to a nearby house for help.

With no hospitals in the area, the best they could do for Fatima was to wrap her injured hands in gauze bandages. 

Because their home had been destroyed by the explosion, Nafla and Fatima were forced to wander from village to village as they tried to avoid further bombings. Fatima’s injuries became infected but eventually healed over. 

When the end to the bombing that Nafla had hoped for never came, she decided to take her daughter and flee to Lebanon where they are currently living in a UNHCR apartment close to the Syrian border.

Fortunately for Fatima, the country her mother brought her to as a refugee is also home to INARA, a Non-governmental Organization based in Lebanon that steps in to fill the gaps in access to medical treatment when not provided by other institutions or NGOs and also provides financial assistance where needed.

INARA takes on the role of case manager and establishes links between vulnerable children in need of medical care and a network of medical providers.

Fatima was referred to INARA by International Medical Corps (IMC) another global, humanitarian, nonprofit organization dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through health care training. IMC had been providing Fatima with mental health services.

When Fatima and her mother first visited the INARA office, they were already resigned to the fact that Fatima would spend the rest of her life as an amputee. Fatima’s self-consciousness about her disability had already caused her to become a recluse at her young age, in spite of her mother’s urgings to get out of the apartment and make new friends.

But an X-Ray at the American University Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) revealed something that managed to restore Fatima’s hope of having the use of her hands restored again someday.

Astonishingly, the X-Rays showed that even though improper care of her wounds had resulted in scar tissue forming over Fatima’s injuries, the bones of her hands were still intact within the stumps at the end of her arms!

Armed with this new knowledge surgeons at AUBMC came up with a plan to restore the use of Fatima’s hands with a yearlong series of surgeries and finger-like prosthetics attached to what’s left of her original hands.

On January 28, 2016, the day before her 15th birthday, Fatima had the first of her life-changing surgeries. Next year she hopes to be cutting the cake herself at her own sweet sixteen party. 

Her plans do not end with cutting cake. Fatima loves to read and write and dreams of becoming a language teacher and teaching Arabic to young children someday.