There’s an elevator at Falls Park but Salee Allawe is determined to take the stairs from Main Street down to the bridge over the Reedy River.
“I want to do it,” the plucky 10-year-old Iraqi girl announces.
And so she does, carefully placing her right prosthetic leg on a step and then her left, using bubble gum pink forearm crutches for support. (more…)
People Magazine spent some time with Salee, NMV and local volunteers in Greenville, SC. They got some great photographs and put together a 4-page spread for their September 14 issue. Here are scans of their pages (the images are rather large):
Eight months after an American bomb blew off her legs, 9-year-old Salee Allawy came to Greenville, S.C., for surgery, therapy and prosthetic legs.
She came with her father, Hussein Allawy, sponsored by the nonprofit, No More Victims, which works to obtain medical scholarships for war-injured Iraqi children, and to forge ties between American and Iraqi communities.
“I wasn’t expecting the kindness,” Allawy said through an interpreter. “In Iraq, we see the bad side of America. Here we see the good side.” (more…)
Salee Allawe, a ten-year-old child, was critically injured on November 7, 2006 while playing with her brother, cousin and some friends outside her uncle’s home in Haswa, Iraq. Salee said they were playing hopscotch when US jets flew overhead and fired missiles. A US missile killed her 15 year-old brother and her cousin and blew off Salee’s legs at the knees.
Salee and her immediate family are Sunnis and were forced to leave Baghdad by Shiite militias. Salee’s father, Hussein Allawe, took them to Haswa, a central Iraqi town between Baghdad and Fallujah, to stay with relatives. I met the vibrantly beautiful Salee at the University of South Carolina in Columbia on 9/12/07 at a presentation of her odyssey to America sponsored by the Muslim Student Ass’n, No More Victims, the Upstate Coalition for Compassion and the Carolina Peace Resource Center. (more…)
The 9-year-old Iraqi girl who lost her legs in an airstrike walked on two prosthetic legs at Shriners Hospital for Children in Greenville for the first time today.
“She was like, ‘Look, I got my second leg. I’m walking,’ ” said interpreter Ghada Saif. “She was really excited.”
“It was one of those moments like when your baby takes her first steps,” said Selena Frank. “You can tell she’s wanting to get moving.” (more…)
The X-ray on the light box exposes the stark reality of Salee Allawe’s injuries — jagged bone below the left knee, a healed thigh fracture on what’s left of her right leg, chunks of shrapnel in the flesh.
“You have a very short segment like this,” says Dr. David Westberry, pointing to the X-ray before the 9-year-old Iraqi girl arrives for an appointment, “and it’s hard to fit a prosthesis that will fit well and stay on, and that small segment of bone doesn’t really function well.”
After she lost both legs in a missile strike last November, doctors in Iraq amputated Salee’s right leg at the knee and the left leg below the knee, says Westberry, an orthopedic surgeon with Shriners Hospital for Children in Greenville. (more…)
Salee Allawe dreams of running with her friends, of walking to her mother with a bouquet of flowers, of finally getting out of her wheelchair.
And with the help of the Upstate, her dream is about to come true.
The 9-year-old Iraqi girl lost both legs below the knee in an airstrike last fall. She arrived in Greenville, where she is undergoing medical treatment at Shriners Hospital for Children, three weeks ago after a two-month journey fraught with danger and uncertainty. (more…)
Salee Allawe dreams of running with her friends, of walking to her mother with a bouquet of flowers, of finally getting out of her wheelchair.
And with the help of the Upstate, her dream is about to come true.
The 9-year-old Iraqi girl lost both legs below the knee in an air strike last fall. She arrived in Greenville, where she is undergoing medical treatment at Shriners Hospital for Children, three weeks ago after a two-month journey fraught with danger and uncertainty. (more…)
Swatting at a yellow balloon and giggling as it bounces off her interpreter’s nose, Salee Allawe hardly presents the picture of a 9-year-old who’s just had surgery after losing her legs in a U.S. air strike that killed her brother a few months ago in Iraq.
“She’s happy and excited,” Lora Alakhwan, an 18-year-old Greenville woman who’s translating for Salee and her father, Hussein, while they’re here for medical care, said Thursday. “She knows it’s a step toward becoming much better.”
Tuesday’s two-hour operation removed a portion of the stump on Salee’s left leg so that it is even with the right leg, said Selena Frank, a member of the Upstate Coalition of Compassion. That will make it easier for her to be fitted with prosthetic legs eventually. (more…)
