Beulah’s Story

When Beulah’s mother was pregnant with her, her father met with an accident at work in which he lost his legs. Changed circumstances meant that her parents decided that they couldn’t afford another child, and her mother took an abortifacient (medicine to induce an abortion). It didn’t work and, in a cruel twist of fate, Beulah was born without legs and with deformed hands – one hand has a thumb and a single finger, and the other has just three fingers, two of which are webbed together.

But Beulah was never one to let her disabilities get in her way. One time when we visited, the children put on a dance routine. Beulah joined in enthusiastically. How do you dance when you don’t have legs? We don’t know. But Beulah managed it.
So we bought her a pair of simple prosthetic legs. To start with she was frightened at being so high up from the ground, and she didn’t have the muscles or co-ordination that she needed, but she learned very quickly and soon she was running around with the other children.

One change that we noticed was that she was now on the same level as the other children, which meant that she was able to interact much better with them. Soon she was taking a leadership role.
As she grew, she outgrew the first set of legs, and we bought her a second set which were a bit more sophisticated. And then she outgrew these, so recently we bought her a third set which have fully flexible knees and ankles. The joints in one leg are locked at the moment so as to help her learn how to use them, but we know that soon she will be exploiting their full potential.