Chad

Historias reales

How Amina lost her hands to a deadly device in Chad

© UNICEF Chad

Amina in hospital after the landmine accident

By Christine Jaulmes

Amina, a 21-year-old woman, hides her arms under her long green veil and bends her head. She does not want anybody to look at her and lives cloistered in her home with her brother and his family. Amina is ashamed of her physical appearance: she has no hands and the lower portion of her face is marked by scars. She finds it difficult to talk about the accident that happened five years ago.

Since then, Amina has lost interest in life and sometimes wishes she died in the accident that mutilated her. " She asks me : why did God bring me into this world? Why am I here?", says his brother, with a worried look. Amina cannot do anything by herself and needs help to eat, to wear her clothes, to wash herself, etc.

It was a very ordinary day when her destiny took a tragic turn. She was quietly walking with her older sister, going to work in the field, when she saw a "beautiful" thing in front of her, on her path. The glittering metal aroused her curiosity and she picked it up with her hands. "My sister said: "Throw it! Throw it!" I put it down immediately, but as I was letting go, it exploded in my face and tore my hands off. I lost consciousness." Amina was quickly rescued and taken to the hospital in Abeche, almost three hundred kilometres away from her town, Iriba, in the North-East of the country.

Iriba has been identified as one of the most affected areas in the East region by the recent Landmine Impact Survey in Chad. Amina is one of the numerous victims of these landmines and unexploded munitions. In Amina's region, mines and unexploded ordnance were left behind as a result of Chad's armed conflicts.

Is it possible to avoid such accidents? "There are too many dangerous objects and it's not possible to distinguish those that are harmful from those that are harmless", says Amina, adding that it is important that the government sensitise the population to the dangers of landmines and uxo." In Chad, the Haut Commissariat national au Déminage, the national agency responsible for mine action programs, has a mine awareness team, but it is only the beginning. Up till now, very few communities were reached by mine risk education activities. UNICEF is aiming to give technical and material support to the HCND in order to develop a national mine risk education strategy, targeting the most impacted areas and communities. This is the only way to prevent tragedies like the one that befell Amina.

© UNICEF Chad

Meeting with rural community leaders for mine awareness

Five years after her accident, Amina is still desperately waiting to get prosthesis for her hands. In N'Djamena where she lives now, prosthesis are only available for those who have lost their legs. "For my sister, we need to get the prosthesis from Germany or from Cameroon and it costs 2 to 3 million CFA Francs (about 3000 US$), a price that I cannot afford", explains her brother Moussa, who is a university teacher. "This is the only thing that would give her a little hope".