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Helping a Teenage Assassination Attempt Survivor: Seeds of Change?
By Jeff Fredrick, MS, CO, BOCP  On April 14, 2002, Alvaro Uribe Vélez, then
president-elect of Colombia due to take office in one month,
travels to Barranquilla.
Blanca Linda Rodriguez Charris, age 16, is finishing her
after-school job cleaning the small police station next to the
bridge that leads to Barranquilla. She is in the sixth grade and is
fortunate to be in school at all. She only started classes after
taking the job at the police station. It is the policeman who
insists she continue her education, and he makes it possible. Her
home is a mere ten meters (11 feet) beyond the bridge.
A young policeman offers to walk Blanca home. As they prepare to
cross the bridge, two small children--a seven-year-old boy and his
five-year-old sister--stop with their goat herd to see if he will
buy them a Coke. One by one, the animals dart into the police
station. Since Blanca has just cleaned it, the officer tells her to
wait a moment and hurries back to chase the children and goats from
the building.
Blanca notices a satchel on the edge of the bridge, but pays
little attention. She waits patiently near the satchel as a bus
with cars behind it hurries toward her on the road. When the bus
passes, a bomb in the satchel detonates. Another, hidden in a fish
peddler's cart below the bridge, fortunately malfunctions.
The bus driver dies 22 days after the incident. Blanca receives
multiple fragmentation wounds and loses her leg above the knee. An
infant on the bus is also injured by shrapnel, and the police chief
has hearing loss and some mental complications.
Blanca Found Near Death
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Debbie Plescia, CPO, and patient following Blanca’s first prosthetic consult. |
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Blanca's mother, Luz Elvia Charris, feels an
incredible rumble as the concussion hits her small home. Roof tiles
fly off houses near the bridge. Mrs. Charris stumbles outside and
sees a car struggle by with all four tires on fire. She doesn't
realize it belongs to the president-elect. Down the road,
Vélez is hurried out of the mangled vehicle into another that
speeds away.
Dazed, Mrs. Charris moves toward the bridge. Debris is
everywhere. Her neighbor is lying in the door of her house, and
Mrs. Charris stops to help. The lady is badly wounded, but sits up,
and Mrs. Charris hurries on, seeking her daughter. She crosses the
bridge, passing a mangled body. Arriving at the police station, she
suddenly realizes the body is wearing her daughter's school dress.
She returns to find Blanca near death.
I learn all this as Debbie Plescia, CPO, prepares to cast Blanca
for an AK prosthesis. In Colombian hospitals, families--not
hospital staff--provide food and care. Mrs. Charris stays by
Blanca's bed day and night. In her absence, Blanca's younger
sister, now 14, is taken advantage of by a boyfriend. She watches
Plescia with a big smile as she holds her newborn son.
Once Vélez took office, he replaced the Charris' home and
others destroyed in the blast. Blanca healed well, but is deeply
scarred physically and emotionally. The opportunity to make her
first prosthesis is a privilege from a personal perspective, as
well as a contribution to Colombia's president.
More Needed than O&P Care
The case is a vivid example of one of the critical differences
in rehabilitation between developed and undeveloped nations. Once
Blanca is successfully fitted with her prosthesis, we will do our
best to insure she continues her education. Such sociological
aspects of the patient's personal life are seldom directly targeted
by rehabilitation practitioners in the US. Here, they are a
necessary ingredient to full recovery. Once we intervene, if we
choose to really change the lives of our patients, our
responsibility spreads like oil on water. In setting such an
example to local practitioners on all levels of the clinical team,
the goal is to plant seeds of change beyond Blanca's prosthesis or
the new house purchased by the president.
My scheduled duties on the trip conclude at an interview with a
local representative of ACNUR, the UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Refugees. When we attempt to leave the building,
the rains have come turning streets into rivers. We are told that
during recent similar rains, the houses of 20 poor people were
destroyed. Although foot bridges were quickly constructed to allow
the poor to pass safely, they must pay to use them.
The poor pay for what the rich accept as expected conveniences,
at least in this part of the world. What remains for us to
determine (hopefully with the aid of a USAID grant), is how to make
a few of life's "expected" or humanitarian conveniences available
to at least some of Barranquilla's refugees and displaced
residents. Nowhere does skill in O&P means as much as it does
in an environment like this. It is just the start, the seed of a
process that might open the door into a better world--for some,
anyway. And, not to be overlooked, it presents an opportunity to
give away some of the abundance that we have so carelessly grown
accustomed to in the US. 
Table Of Contents - February 2004
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