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 Exercises

A New Future for Dorah

   by Bronwen Jones

Dorah will be four in April. When she was seven months old, the house in which she lived caught fire. The heat destroyed her hands and face.At the end of 1997 doctors in South Africa recommended that her eyes should be removed to prevent infection. Was this necessary? asked The Times. Was there a surgeon somewhere who could save Dorah's eyes?

    Today, thanks to the generosity of our readers, Dorah has a very different future. The plea for medical assistance to allow her to keep her sense of light and dark has attracted interest from many eminent doctors. It has also raised ₤76 000 in donations － people wrote from as far a field as Australia and New York.

    The most likely option now is that Dorah will come to London in the spring and that the first of several operations will take place to rebuild her eyelids. Richard Collin, a consultant surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital, has offered his skills for free, and the hospital fees of £ 6 500 for the first two operations will be met by donations.

    Mr. Collin has yet to examine Dorah, but he was optimistic after Sky TV shot medical footage of her injuries. If the initial assessment on Dorah is good, she will have the first operation immediately. This will use skin from elsewhere on her body, probably her legs, to create a curtain over the eyes. She will be in hospital for 10 days, followed by six weeks’ convalescence to allow the scars to heal. During this time Dorah's eyes could be tested to see how much sight she has.

    Many Times readers have offered Dorah accommodation, but she may need to remain in London to have her other needs assessed at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, or possibly East Grinstead, where the Victoria Hospital has a specialized unit in plastic surgery. The second operation, to divide her new eyelids, would take two to three days in hospital.

    Then Dorah would fly home to South Africa for six months. Her scar tissue would heal and she would have daily treatment with eye drops and cream. After this, she would return to the UK for a third operation to try to raise the eyelids by attaching a muscle from behind the eyes to the lids. In this, or a fourth operation, Mr. Collin would try to thicken the eyelids by adding tissue and more skin.
    Because Dorah's case is so unusual, none of the procedures or time estimates will be confirmed until she arrives here, and securing permission for her to travel involves much red tape in South Africa. Events took an even more unexpected turn when I found Dorah's mother, Margaret Mokoena, living in a squatter camp. I had been told by hospital administrators and by a reporter who had visited the camp that Margaret was only 14 when Dorah was born. When I finally met her, I realized that one never knows the truth until one has ascertained it for oneself.

    Margaret is now 26. She left school with the education level of a 12-year-old because there was no money to pay for fees, uniform and transport. She grew up in a dysfunctional home, with a drunken father who abused her mother so badly that she walked out seven years ago. Margaret has not heard from her since.

    Her father's other wife stabbed Margaret's father in the chest a year ago － he died. Margaret was raised mainly by her frail grandmother, Violet, on whose monthly state pension of R 470 (£53) the family survived. Margaret said that if ever she secured part-time work tilling the maize fields, the men in the family spent her earnings on alcohol. Even Dorah's father － who has shown no interest in her since she was injured － beat Margaret. She has burn scars on her right arm where he hit her with an iron.

    From this horrific background a quietly spoken, thoughtful young woman has emerged. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she has had only one child and has no intention of finding another male partner. She has no positive role models to encourage her to do so.

    How she lost contact with her child is a story steeped in the attitudes of the apartheid era that still affect so much of South African society. Margaret has little self-confidence; she curtseyed when we met.

    The blaze in which Dorah was injured started when a candle fell from its holder. The cardboard used to cover the hut quickly caught fire. Margaret was at a neighbour's home fetching water for Violet, who was sick. "I came back and flames were coming through the roof," she whispers. "I looked inside and when the flames seemed lower over the bed, my brother and I grabbled the mattress and pulled Dorah out. She was so badly hurt that I was scared to touch her."

    An ambulance tour of hospitals followed through the night, with rejection and referral at every turn. When eventually Dorah was taken into the intensive care unit of the Far East Rand Hospital, Margaret was told to go home.

    She had been separated from her baby before, when Dorah was born two months premature. "I think it was because I was so badly beaten by my child's father. They kept her in an incubator for two weeks."

    Margaret was also used to being bullied by hospital officials, who always thought they knew best. She had neither the language skills nor confidence to argue with them. And she had no money.

    The visits were occasional, but on one occasion she was told her child had been transferred and that no one could give her a contact number for the hospital. Margaret was told to go to the magistrate's court to sign papers to allow Dorah to become a ward of court, although she did not understand the terminology.

    "I did not go to court. But I did not know what to do. I had no money for lawyers."

    But Margaret understood that Dorah had been adopted and that her maternal rights had been removed. I took her to be reunited with Dorah.

    I cannot easily find words to express the feeling of the two of them being together again. This was not a bad mother who did not care about her child. It was a bad or indifferent society that did not try hard enough to keep them together. A society that looked at them in terms of what they could not do or did not have, and judged them thus.

    How wide can a smile be when a mother holds the child that she has been separated from for two years? How soft can a look of contentment be as Dorah's arms wrap around her mother's neck and hold her tight?

    Lumps in the throat cannot convey the joy of seeing such an injustice righted at last. Of seeing Margaret cover Dorah's neck and ears with little kisses, cradling her, singing to her softly.

    I cannot pretend Dorah knew who her mother was. At the "handover" she clung to me － she knows my voice, my hair, my perfume. But I had at last used the words "your mother" when talking to her before the meeting. She knew I was the mother of her playmate Tristan. Now I told her that this was her mother. I believe that she understands. This reunion is only the first milestone on a long road for mother and child, but it is a remarkable one in South Africa.

    In addition to finding the best medical solution for Dorah, the task is to find the best and swiftest way to educate her mother to care for her. So when people asked what they could do, I requested early-childhood development videos, the easiest way to give information to barely literate nursing assistants in institutions such as the one in which Dorah lives.

    Some people asked if children could help. I suggested that they send toys specially tailored to Dorah's needs. Until now, Dorah has spent most of her life in a cot, and is far behind where she should be. But with the many hours that my son Tristan, 7, his friend Thobeka, also 7, and I have spent playing with Dorah, we have every belief that she is an intelligent child with much potential.

    One of the most exciting responses has been from Passmores Secondary School, in Edmonton, North London, where pupils are working on a frame from which scented and textured objects will hang. This will allow Dorah to smell a bag of herbs, or crackle a bag of Cellophane.

    They are also stitching a Dorah-size play rug that combines interesting textures, and are recording a story on tape that goes something like this: "One day Dorah went for a walk. The gravel path was rough on her feet" － they will glue gravel pieces on card for Margaret to place beneath Dorah's feet. "She found a flower in the garden. Its petals were soft like satin" － there will be satin ribbon for Dorah to feel.

    But for now I have this enormous feeling of hope for Dorah. I can only smile as I see the soft curves of Margaret's profile and see Dorah's dreams reflected there.

    (1 543 words)

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