SULAYMANIYAH, 10 March (IRIN) - On
the afternoon of his third birthday, Nawruz has divided his time between
riding a tricycle and kicking a football. Not bad for a child who suffers
from cerebral palsy, and who was born with the right side of his body paralysed.
His father, Kamil Faki Mohamad, still
finds it difficult to believe his eyes. "It's incredible how much
Nawruz has improved in the past two years," he told IRIN. "If
he's riding a bike today, he'll be able to drive a car later."
Leaning back against a bank of hollyhocks, his son's grandparents look on in a heat-induced daze, a half-eaten picnic in front of them. His bike wheels stuck in a trough in the grass, Nawruz slaps away his father's attempts to help him.
"We do everything the physiotherapists tell us to do," said Mohamad, who works as a technician for the electricity board in Halabja, a town in the far southeast of Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. "Nawruz's bones need strengthening, so we make sure he eats plenty of protein - eggs and meat."
Nawruz is one of 13,000 children to have been treated since Dutch-registered NGO Acorn set up its first child physiotherapy centre in Sulaymaniyah governorate. The idea was the brainchild of Australian physiotherapist Kathy Saeed, who first visited the region in 1991.
"I saw straight away that nothing was being done to help children with disabilities," she told IRIN in Sulaymaniyah. "So we set up our first centre here in 1993."
Its success bolstered by Acorn's efforts to train doctors around the region to recognize the first signs of childhood disability, Sulaymaniyah's Children's Rehabilitation Centre (CRC) has suffered only one major setback.
"Many of the patients' parents simply couldn't afford to travel here every month, and a lot of them failed to understand that physiotherapy is a lengthy process," Saeed explained. "We had a lot of children dropping out."
Following the opening of a similar CRC in Dahuk governorate in 1996, in 1999 Acorn set up the first of its Satellite Physiotherapy Units (SPU) in Qala Diza, Chamchamal, Kalar and Halabja, where Nawruz is a patient. It now has a SPU in each of the 10 district towns of Sulaymaniyah governorate.
"The centre in Raniya is the most crowded," physiotherapist Mohamad Rashid, in charge of supervising the SPUs, told IRIN. He suspects that may be because of primitive obstetric conditions in high villages around this remote town.
Two of the commonest conditions his teams face - cerebral palsy and Erb's palsy (paralysis of the arm following damage to nerves in the shoulder) - are known to be linked to complications during labour.
"Many of these children are born at home, of course," he added, "but there is still a need for ongoing training for midwives here."
Saeed is more cautious. "We have computerized records of every one of the children we have seen since 1993," she said. "The statistics are sitting there waiting for an expert to come and decipher them."
With demand for paediatric physiotherapists growing, Acorn helped set up a two-year diploma course in Sulaymaniyah in 1997. Rashid says this has set a benchmark for the region. "We train all new recruits for our centres," he said. "Those trained in Arbil need three months to get them up to speed. The Sulaymaniyah graduates generally need only a week."
Saeed now has plans to recruit outside experts to help prepare a four-year degree course in physiotherapy at the city's university. That, she says, will require funding. "The Kurdish authorities are only able to offer a stipend of US $400 a month," she said. "That's not enough to attract the international people we need."
There are two other small glitches that could affect Acorn's immediate future. It's recent handover of organization and funding to the Kurdish authorities was vital to ensuring the centres' incorporation into the local health system. But Rashid fears standards may have dropped slightly as a result. "Part of that is due to the Ministry of Health's cash shortage," he said. "But referral and auditing systems have got more bureaucratic too."
The second problem involves Acorn's decision last June to extend its work to Mosul and Kirkuk. "There's a huge amount of work to be done there, and the centre we have in Kirkuk is very small," Saeed said. She thought she'd found a solution when she heard that a brand new physiotherapy centre built by Saddam was not being used. Baghdad has since told her that it was designed for the military only, and should stay that way.
"It's a bizarre decision, frankly," she said. "And a great pity too. We could have had it up and running in a fortnight."
[ENDS]
IRIN-Asia
Tel: +92-51-2211451
Fax: +92-51-2292918
Email: IrinAsia@irin.org.pk
[This Item is Delivered to the "Asia-English" Service of the UN's IRIN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations. For further information, free subscriptions, or to change your keywords, contact e-mail: IRIN@ocha.unon.org or Web: http://www.irinnews.org . If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Reposting by commercial sites requires written IRIN permission.]
Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2004