US hospital gives Nigerian amputee new limbs for free

“After a madman hacked off both her hands two years ago, 17-year-old Ruth Idowu prayed to Jesus for new ones. Ruth Idowu’s life changed forever on Oct. 2, 2010, transforming her from a carefree high school graduate to a helpless amputee. She was clearing tables in the tiny café her parentsown in Oja Odan, a city of 7,000 in Southwest Nigeria. A drug-crazed man with a knife burst in and began slashing at Ruth from behind. When she raised both hands to protect her neck, the attacker chopped off her right hand at the wrist and severed her left arm at the elbow.

Today, the people at Johnson’s Orthopedic Appliances in Riverside are making Ruth two new appendages free of charge to restore the limbs and the independence she’d so brutally lost in her native country.

The journey was set in motion by Ruth’s sponsors and hosts, Tunde and Titi Akinremi – a married couple with residences in both Colton and Nigeria. Tunde, 57, a paraplegic, founded a support group decades ago in their African homeland for the disabled. Learning about Ruth’s plight, he quickly notified friends he knew through a special-needs family camp in Southern California who had connections to Johnson’s Orthopedic.

Since October, Mike Openshaw, 35, the head prosthetist at the clinic, located at 7254 Magnolia Avenue, has been fitting Ruth with temporary mechanical limbs, readying her for the finished products in a couple of weeks.

“She’s doing wonderfully, better than I expected,” he said. “When she came she said, ‘Get my hands back’.”
Idowu had never heard of or seen artificial limbs. Openshaw explained that he could only make her arms functional again, not restore her hands.

As she awaited a recent appointment, Idowu, now 19, licked mango ice cream on a stick clasped between the aluminum pincers attached to a plastic device on her right arm. “I can eat,” she marveled with a big grin, relishing a simple pleasure long denied her. She talked about learning to drive, using a computer and studying accounting when she returns home early next year.

“She loves to boil water in our kitchen,” Titi Akinremi, 58, said with a laugh. “She used to do a lot of cooking in her parents’ restaurant.”

Titi’s husband Tunde, a math teacher in Pomona, said that Ruth picked up the phone when he called her from work. Her occupational therapist, Cathy Armitage, who is volunteering her services, rewarded Idowu’s progress with a battery-operated toothbrush. When asked what tasks had become impossible, she replied in halting English: “Everything.”