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Impoverished Haiti struggles to offer happy endings

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Summary of story from the LA Times, March 20, 2011

Sounlove Zamor, a young woman who lost both legs below the knee in Haiti’s earthquake is walking again on prosthetic legs thanks to the LA Times and doctors in Israel.

However, her story has not yet reached a fairy-tale conclusion.

On her recent return to Haiti the mood was not one of celebration but of continued heartache.

Twenty-year-old  Zamor was caught in a collapsed house after the quake struck. Her father was killed in the disaster.

She and her four sisters have no work and no prospect of any in the foreseeable future as the redevelopment of the country’s landscape and infrastructure fails to materialise.

In a small way the Zamor family are lucky. They share the home of an aunt who lives in Canada and sends money for food.

Such shelter is rare in a city where hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in squalid tent camps.

Ms Zamor longs to return to the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv where she learned a little Hebrew and was taught how to balance on her new limbs.

“I was praying from the day I got there that I wouldn’t come back to Haiti,” she said.

Haiti has very little in the way of services for the disabled, so her prosthetic legs do at least give her opportunities she would not have in a wheelchair.

However, her gratitude at her ability to walk again is tempered by the reality of having nowhere to go.

She wants to go back to school and to be a lawyer or journalist.

The Los Angeles-based group that sponsored her rehabilitation, Friends of Sheba Medical Center, is gathering funds to help.

Executive director Jack Saltzberg said: “My main goal in interacting with her is that she not take things for granted, and that she will learn that there will be only one person who can really help her, that is herself.”

However, Ms Zamor understandably wonders whether she would have been better never to have left her homeland to glimpse the life others are able to lead in less impoverished surroundings.

“I feel grateful. I can visit my mother. That’s a good thing in my life… But what comes after that?”

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