Big Smiles All Around

A 15-month-old boy gets a new lease on life after successful facial surgery

- Siyabonga Kamnqa

IT TOOK a chance meeting on a busy street in Lagos, Nigeria, to change the life of a little boy.

Nancy Ikeokwu (29) was walking with her son, Somto, when a woman approached her with information that sounded like the answer to her prayers.

Her child was also born with the condition that afflicted Nancy’s 15-month old son, Joy Bassey (36) told her.

But there was a chance Somto could be helped: her daughter, Akikere-Abasi (8), had had surgery in 2015 sponsored by the World Craniofacial Foundation (WCF) and had been given a new lease on life.

What’s more, the surgery had been done by one of Africa’s finest reconstruction surgeons: Professor Frank Graewe, one of the doctors who gained international fame in 2014 when he performed the world’s first successful penile transplant on a man who’d lost his penis after a botched circumcision.

Akikere-Abasi was well on her way to looking like a “normal” child, Joy told Nancy then gave her the contact details for the WCF. Maybe they could help her too, she told the upset mom.

They could – and they did. Barely a month after Nancy contacted the foundation she was told she and her little boy would be flown to Cape Town for surgery.

“I couldn’t believe my ears,” Nancy says. “I screamed at the top of my voice, ‘Oh God, you are an amazing God’.”

WE MEET the little boy, his relieved mom and Professor Graewe at Cape Town’s Mediclinic Louis Leipoldt Hospital after his successful surgery.

Somto is in high spirits, jumping on his bed and laughing with his mom, clearly not bothered by the brace attached to his head.