Contact: Sean Kearns, 707-826-5102, [email protected]
ARCATA, Calif. -- It was a gruesome scene far away from home for Carolyn Christenson, an occupational therapist and a Humboldt State University lecturer in adaptive physical education, as she observed children with hacked-off limbs, women who had been mutilated and other horror stories.
She had been asked to go to Africa to help these victims of civil unrest. Part of a team of medical specialists sent to the West African nation of Sierra Leone, Christenson arrived along with a cargo of 200 artificial limbs.
In just two weeks this spring in Freetown, the Sierra Leone capital, Christenson and an orthopedic surgeon fitted 160 people--15 of them children--with revolutionary new prosthetic devices, which cost $500 each.
"They're specially made and socketless, and so they're easier to fit. It's a breakthrough in limbs," Christenson said after returning from her mercy mission, sponsored by the non-governmental organization known as World Hope International.
Its "Limbs of Hope" project sought Christenson out because of her general skills as an occupational therapist and her particular skills at both modifying the prosthetics and teaching the local nationals to do the same work at a government amputee care-center.
The single mother of two children in college, Christenson paid her own way to Sierra Leone to help because "I've been given gifts and have realized my childhood dream of being this kind of therapist. So I need to give back."
Despite her lifetime experience with the disabled--"Even as a 10-year-old I used to follow physical therapists around at my hometown hospital because I thought they were cool," she says--Christenson wasn't fully prepared for her African experience.
"One woman had her arm chopped off with an ax and was told 'Take this to the president' by the terrorists... It was grim to think that people could do that to each other," she said.
But the experience also left the specialist in upper extremity rehabilitation upbeat because it gave the mutilated men, women and children a measure of self-sufficiency.
"My focus has been on mainstreaming people with disabilities, whether in Arcata or Africa," she said, adding that she is leaning toward accepting a new assignment, perhaps in late May, that would take her on a follow-up mission of mercy.
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