In Colorado, a Gazan teenager injured in war receives an artificial leg as she worries about home

Tuesday, May. 21, 2024

Ahed Bseiso took a step forward. And then another.

Her hands held the walker and her eyes were trained downward, watching her left foot advance — and then her new right foot, which followed in a careful, slightly stilted rhythm. She’d learned a short time earlier how to navigate the prosthetic leg, needing only a few moments supported by a set of parallel bars before she lifted her hands and took tentative steps forward.

She was at an Englewood prosthetic clinic, its walls covered in photos of smiling people playing softball or golfing with their prosthetics. Her appointment Saturday was a world away from Bseiso’s home in the northern Gaza Strip.

It was nearly five months to the day since Bseiso’s leg and home were torn apart by an Israeli bomb — five months since her uncle, a surgeon with no other options, placed her on the kitchen table.

Clearing away the bread that Bseiso’s mother had been rolling out moments before, he amputated her leg using kitchen tools, a sponge and a bucket. There was no anesthetic.

It was too dangerous to transport her to the nearest hospital, even though the family lived around the corner from one. But Bseiso, 18, would spend time in over-stretched hospitals over the next weeks, amid a journey of trauma and, eventually, recovery that brought her from the epicenter of the Israel-Hamas war to the United States. While the war continues, she’s received care through a program organized by the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and its partners.

On Saturday, as Bseiso neared the end of the clinic’s hallway with her walker, she looked up and smiled at her sister. Mona, 21, had been with Ahed when the bomb hit their home in December; they had been on the top floor of their building, trying to adjust their antenna so that they could speak with their father in Belgium. When the explosion tore through the wall, they were too scared to call out to each other, afraid of what silence would mean.

After a brief walk down another hallway outside the clinic, Ahed sat and pulled a pink-striped sneaker onto her left foot. Mona sat beside her.

The prosthetic — which Ahed wanted to resemble her own leg and not a robot’s — normally would cost roughly $12,000. Hanger, its maker, agreed to fit and provide it to her for free.

At Hanger’s clinic in Swedish Medical Center, a prosthetist made a mold of her stump just below her knee — a mass of reddish-purple scar tissue, with wounds that still haven’t fully healed and pockmarks that continue to push out pieces of shrapnel and debris, some from her family home that are still lodged in her body. That first mold was then used to create a plastic mold that fits into the prosthetic. In the ankle, a hydraulic mechanism allows the foot to move like normal.

The prosthetic, complete with a flesh-colored foot, felt good, said Bseiso, who speaks limited English and communicated mostly through a translator, while talking to a small group of reporters. When she first stood up, it felt like a real foot.

Dr. Omar Mubarak, who helped arrange for the prosthetic and acted as Ahed and Mona’s host during their weekend in Denver, watched Ahed sit down.

For a moment, he wept and struggled to speak.

“It was amazing,” he said later. “She picked it up so fast.”

Out of a war zone

The latest explosion of violence, which began with Hamas’ terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people, has escalated for months. Israel has bombarded Gaza and launched ground offensives into the territory, resulting in heavy civilian casualties. The death toll in Gaza has surpassed 35,000 killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants. Many have been women and children.

Thousands more have been maimed. Ahed Bseiso is among a growing toll of Palestinian youth who’ve lost limbs since the bombing campaign began. By December, according to UNICEF, at least 1,000 Gazan children had lost one or both of their legs.

Bseiso’s family filmed the December kitchen-table amputation, and it soon garnered international attention, including from media outlets and from the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

The group worked to get Bseiso out of Gaza and find her proper medical care. It connected with Mubarak, a vascular surgeon whose grandfather was one of the first Palestinians in Denver, and Reema Wahdan, a breast cancer researcher who leads the relief fund’s Colorado chapter.

Bseiso is the first Palestinian youth brought to Denver by the relief fund since the 1990s, Wahdan said. She and Mubarak said they hoped Bseiso’s journey would open a path for hospitals to provide more care and charity to injured Gazan children.

Even with the attention the amputation video amassed, Ahed and Mona faced a harrowing journey to get out.

As the relief fund worked to secure her escape from Gaza, Ahed endured unmedicated agony and treatment, repeated visa rejections, and trips to and from the hospital.

Each new bandage, and each shelling, brought back the trauma — both physical and mental — of the bombing.

Even when Bseiso and her sister’s departure from Gaza was approved, albeit without their mother and two other siblings, it took nearly 20 attempts, piled into a car over and over, to make it out. Israeli firepower kept turning them back, Bseiso said, and one of their drivers was killed.

With the relief fund’s help, the sisters eventually made it to Egypt. By February, they were in Greenville, South Carolina, where the sisters share a room at a charity home.

Both are still students — Ahed is studying information technology, Mona hopes to become a pharmacist — via remote learning courses. Ahed had only just started when the war began. Their first university, in Gaza, has been destroyed. The sisters now take classes through a West Bank university.

Over the weekend, their journey to Colorado brought them to a place where America’s role in the war, as an ally and arms supplier of Israel, has divided people and sparked protests. At Denver International Airport on Friday night, a group of supporters carrying balloons, flowers, gift baskets and Palestinian flags greeted the sisters in the terminal.

The well-wishers stooped to kiss Ahed in her wheelchair and thank God for her health. Shortly after, elsewhere in the city in an unrelated demonstration, pro-Palestine protesters shut down part of Speer Boulevard near Ball Arena.

The airport greeting was an emotional conduit for Colorado’s contingent of the Palestinian diaspora, who’ve watched for months as death and horror has mounted in Gaza.

“We feel a lot of guilt not being there,” said Wahdan, who acted as translator and chaperone for the Bseisos, on Saturday over lunch on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall. They’d come directly from Ahed’s prosthetic appointment; Mubarak wanted to let them shop and to show them the Flatirons.

Ahed and Mona, who were eating chips and queso for the first time, took pictures of the buskers on the plaza outside.

“You want to be there,” Wahdan said of Gaza. “But how do you do it? You can’t send them money; all the banks are closed. You can’t support their education; there’s no school. This is the little sand grain that we can do. That’s where all of our grief goes.”

“What happened to me is miniscule”

Ahed Bseiso is quiet, with deep brown eyes and a toothy smile that matches her sister’s. On the drive up to Boulder, she’d fallen asleep with her prosthetic still on.

She is most direct and forthcoming when describing the bombing and her journey out of Gaza. Her eyes briefly shined with emotion while recounting it, but her voice did not falter.

Annie Clyborne, an international pediatric health care coordinator with the relief fund who works directly with the sisters, said they are almost always calm and almost never complain.

Part of their determination to speak up, Bseiso said, is because she and Mona know the suffering in Gaza continues, even if they’ve physically left it. In addition to the rising death toll, the head of the United Nations World Food Program has said there’s a “full-blown famine” in the region, and about 80% of the territory’s population has been displaced.

“What happened to me is miniscule to what’s happening to others and all the other Palestinian children and the families that are in Gaza,” Bseiso said, through Wahdan.

At lunch, as a server refilled waters and lemonades, Mona Bseiso said it was eye-opening, being in a country where the inhabitants weren’t constantly consumed with their own daily survival.

In English, she said that “all of the people in Gaza are overthinking, all the time.” Breaking out of that survival mindset — accepting security, food, water, calm — was “not comfortable,” she said, after a life spent otherwise.

The family is raising money to get their remaining relatives out of Gaza. Before they left, their uncle, the surgeon, had pledged not to abandon Ahed, even if it meant dying with her, she said.

Clyborne said the sisters are most likely to reunite with their father in Belgium, where he owns a restaurant. Mona pinched her index finger to her thumb when describing her favorite dish of his: steak with white sauce, mushrooms and rice.

But without hesitation, both sisters said they wanted to return to Gaza. Anywhere else is not home.

As a light rain fell, the group piled into Mubarak’s car and drove from Pearl Street to Boulder’s Chautauqua Park. The sisters were due to fly out the next morning and be in Greenville by Sunday afternoon. With her prosthetic in Mubarak’s trunk, Ahed lifted herself into her wheelchair, and Mubarak steered her up and out of the parking lot.

Clyborne and Mona stopped to look at the flowers. Ahed took out her phone to take a picture, its screen reflecting her face back at her. She pointed the phone straight ahead, toward the mountains and the sloping trail.

Ahead of her, a kite flew over the park, flapping between gray rain clouds and the emerging sun.

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