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You can help Stephen walk again

“A big triangular head is expected,” his doctor, Orthopaedic surgeon James Mogire, later explained to Mike and me.

“And his bones tend to slump. That the lower side of the bones will actually appear flattened out. This is because they break, they heal in that position and because there’s a tendency to be in pain, they heal in an abnormal position and that will be the new posture.” he explained.

Stephen’s condition occurs when “a form of protein that is used to form the fibre in the bone, collagen type I, is not of the proper component causing a little stress to make it snap,” Dr Mogire explains.

It presents in every 20,000 live births and in some cases the children don’t even make it out of the womb alive. Sixty-five percent of reported cases are inherited but Stephen falls in the 35 percent for whom it occurred sporadically.

But while the odds may not have been in his favour, Stephen’s lucky he’s got a grin to show, because according to Dr Mogire, his teeth are just as brittle as his bones.

“This is just me. I’m always smiling,” he says when I wonder at his grin.

But when he doesn’t think you’re looking the smile disappears, his brow furrows.

It’s the same worry that lines his mother, Faith Wambui’s face.

But she can’t be bothered to put on a good face for the camera.

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She is an unemployed widow with three children (triplets) left to feed, clothe and educate with one of them confined to a hospital bed unless she can come up with more money than she’s seen in all her 54 years. Her four other children are grown up.

“I think the least amount of money I’ve ever had to raise in all the times he’s broken his bones is Sh150,000 but even then this is 10 times that and every day he doesn’t get the surgery he needs, the longer he stays in hospital, the bigger the bill gets, the longer he takes to finish school and the less money I have for the other two,” she laments.

“And so she doesn’t even bother to hold back the tears that steal their way down her face.”

The hands she uses to wipe them away evidence the manual labour she’s undertaken to be both, “mother and father,” to her children.

“My husband who used to be an accountant for Nairobi Afrigas died from meningitis when the triplets, including Stephen, were two years old in 1997.

So I moved us from Makadara to Kayole and kept us afloat by getting paid to wash other people’s clothes.

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