Maya Merhi, the 8 years old girl, born with no legs., was found moving on artificial limbs made of plastic tubing and tin cans, around a Syrian camp.
Sooner the girl was brought to Istanbul when her condition and her pictures taken by AFP in Syria, were seen around the world.
“Maya will walk,” said Dr. Mehmet Zeki Culcu, the prosthetics specialist treating her at an Istanbul clinic. “God willing, in three months time.”
Maya Merhi, who is basically from Aleppo region, before bringing to Istanbul for the treatment was living with her father at a camp for displaced people in northern Syria.
As soon as the pictures of Maya Merhi in which she was having difficulty crawling around the refugee camp with artificial limbs made a huge impact across the world, both the father and daughter were evacuated from Syria by the Turkish authorities and brought to Istanbul for treatment at a specialized clinic.
Maya, like her father who also is suffering from the same kind of physical disorder, had been able to move around more easily by crawling than her father. But due to a recent surgery, her crawling speed was hindered because of the length of the limbs being reduced.
“After the operation, she was not able to move around and was sitting the whole time in a tent,” Mohammad told AFP in an interview at the Istanbul clinic.
Mohammad further added to his conversation,”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. Then, I added two empty cans of tuna because the plastic was not strong enough to resist the friction with the ground.”
After Mohammad’s experiment with the artificial limbs, Maya couldn’t even walk outside of the tent but on her own crawled to the camp’s school as well.
Mohammad said in the interview that besides Maya he has five other children out of which none of whom suffered from such a condition, he also said that the plastic tubing is replaced once a month and the tins once a week.
“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,” he added.
Dr. Culcu said that after he saw the pictures of Maya walking on her tins, he had decided he himself will pay for the prosthetic legs of Maya and for her father as well.
“We have been contacted by people all over the world who want to make the donation. But this issue is closed and I will take on the cost,” he said.
Besides this Dr. Culcu said that the homemade limbs that her father had constructed in the camp surely provided her with huge benefits in the future as they had got her used to walking.
“We can’t really call what she has prosthetics,” Dr. Culcu said.
“It’s a kind of makeshift system for her to walk. With the energy of desperation, without any means, her father turned that suffering into hope”, he further added.