On the 2nd day of Stand Tall Christmas
We are introducing Nalari…
What a precocious little girl!!!!! Nalari came to Stand Tall in a little bit of a backwards way. Our founder, Masha, was in Tanzania at a restaurant and someone at a neighboring table overheard her conversation and said they knew a little girl with a bad spine. The brought Nalari over to her house the next morning.
Nalari is from the Masai tribe. She was 8 years old at the time and couldn’t walk more than a few feet without wheezing because her spine had turned and was growing into her rib cage. She was in and out of different orphanages because since her family needed to herd for work, they just left her in their hut alone and she almost died of malnutrition.
Nalari received her 1st surgery in 2016, where the surgeon implanted “growing rods”. Thank goodness she got to grow because this girl is tall. She just returned to the hospital over the summer where she received her 2nd and final surgery.
Nalari is the child that challenged all our ideas about what recovery means. At the time, we believed that school was all they kids needed to catch up and have a future. Oh, were we wrong!!! After her surgery, we tried to reunite Nalari with her family, but in one week she developed both a fungus and an infection. Obviously, school was not a priority until we could find her a safe and clean place to live. Also, at 8, Nalari couldn’t read or write because she has severe dyslexia and Tanzanian schools don’t acknowledge learning disabilities. So even getting her admission into school was nearly impossible.
Where are we today? Nalari now lives at the amazing Hope Village Orphanage. She is super tall and attending school everyday. She still struggles with learning, but all the kids practice her letters and numbers with her and she is proudly going into 2nd grade in January. The situation isn’t perfect. She still struggles at school everyday trying to learn like “normal” students and although her family visits her regularly, it looks less and less likely that she will be able to return home with them. But, Nalari has truly taught us the true definition of resilience. This beautiful little girls refuses to give up and neither will we.
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