Patti and the pigs

You drive for an hour out of town.
It’s a hot day but the scenery is spectacular with field and woods, valleys and steep hills, children waving and calling, scattered houses and villages, roadside markets, goats, cattle, businesses. Trees you can’t name, with flowers and fruit, rows of tall eucalyptus. And always the red dust from the dirt road.
The driver goes fast, sometimes it feels too fast, but he slows for the bends and bumps and there are no accidents, though there is a clanking in the rear suspension that will require a visit to the garage tonight.
Eventually the ancient Toyota minivan  stops, several hundred metres further down the dwindling track than you thought was wise, or even possible, and it is time to walk. Soon you are on a steep uphill path. You worry vaguely about snakes, more about slipping and falling. Passing plantain trees, cassava and coffee bushes you reach the top of the hill where there is a well built rectangular mud and wattle home with a corrugated iron roof. Chickens ducks and pigs scratch about as you slowly approach. Polite greetings are exchanged and you enter the house and sit on a wooden bench. You wonder if you should lean against the mud wall.
On the dirt floor sits a smiling plump girl finishing her lunch from a bowl – she is eating pieces of cassava with her hands. Her clothes are grimy. She is four years old and we have come to discuss her going to school. A lady breast feeds a smaller child, another sits on the bench beside me and doesn’t say much.
Why have we gone to all this trouble for one girl to get to school? Because Patricia (not her real name) was born with spina bifida and following surgery her left leg is paralysed and numb. She moves by shuffling on the dirt floor and cannot use the locally made crutches that her parents got for her. It is impressive that her siblings and neighbours walk over 3 km to their local primary school in such terrain, many of them barefoot. It is very hard to imagine how Patricia could make the trip. Motorcycle taxis seem to reach most places round here, but this route would challenge a professional trail rider. And how can she get treatment when the nearest suitable hospital is about 80 km away?
We, we did ask the question so we will have to try to come up with some answers. First we will see if we can get her off the floor and get the huge ulcer on her knee to heal. Then establish how she can move about and see about helping the school get ready to receive her. She will need transport walking aids and a an accessible latrine, something in which we are becoming expert.
It’s been a tiring day for me, but this is someone’s life. Leave no one behind!