Stand Tall recently celebrated it’s 4th anniversary. For a special holiday edition, we wanted to highlight all the amazing moments from the past 4 years and a few challenging ones too. Read 12 beautiful stories, one for each day of the Christmas season.
It just seems fitting that for the first day we should go all the back to where it all started, with Benson. When we first met Benson, he was about 9 years old and was suffering from tuberculosis in his spine.
Our founder, was at a restaurant and someone at a neighboring table overheard her conversation and said they knew a little girl with a bad spine. They brought Nalari over to her house the next morning. Nalari’s spine had turned and was growing into her lungs…
She was living with an abusive family member, denied food or a bed, and was forced to skip school and perform long hours of manual labor, scrubbing floors and washing clothes on her hands and knees. This is hard enough for the average person, but nearly impossible for someone with severe back problems.
For the first time in life, 48 children and families had answers to their questions. It was an emotional day for everyone involved.
I got a teary phone call from his mother because Samweli was about to get kicked out of school for failure to pay. To be honest, I felt guilty that I found him a sponsor who would just throw him away so carelessly.
I’m going to share a Stand Tall story that I have never shared before, the story of baby Joan. Full disclosure, this one is quite sad.
As one small organization, there is no way we can help an entire country of children. So what about the ones outside of Stand Tall’s reach, we can’t forget about them.
Even to an untrained eye, it was obvious how desperately David needed surgery. His cervical vertebrae, the ones in his neck, made the shape of an “L”. His curve was so severe that we were worried that one fall, and he would be paralyzed for life.
This poor little girl was so scared the day we did her first x-rays, that we had to take them laying down because she wouldn’t stop crying. This is definitely not the Jamila you see today.
What made Andrew so different is that he was angry. He was angry at everything and everybody. When we sent him for surgery, he wouldn’t…
Most you spent the year learning about Zainab and her very long, arduous journey to health. The short version goes like this:
Read the journey of how the 1st ever spine surgery was performed in Tanzania.