The Ottawa Journal from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • Page 81

"Atf Mad A Be AfoDeT shy, Mow Weiildl I Only with artificial arms, because six-year-old Mercedes Benegbris a victim of thalidomide. Still, she fills her home with love and joy. Look at her eyes MERCEDES BENEGBI six years -old with big brown eyes and an impish smile and she' lives in a world that love built. It's a world of paint brushes and coloring books, toy telephones and dolls and people' who love her very, very much. You feel the love that, surrounds' her when you visit her home in the Montreal suburb of Ville d'Anjou at lunchtime.

Her Moroccan-born father, Marcos Benegbi, a glass company shipper, is at work. And she is at the -table with her French-Canadian moth- er, Colette. Suddenly she stops looks at her mother and says, "It's time for our nice caress." 1 Then, for a long mother, and, daughter press close to each other and they kiss. For Mercedes, an only: the caress is i a. ritual.

She has even set By Bill Trent including cover, by Frank Prazak Weekend Magazine hours for it at 7 AM when she rises, at noon when she is home from school and at 8 PM when she retires. You feel it, too, when you visit her at the Ecole Ernest Crepeau where -she is one of the top pupils in her first grade Her teacher, Mrs. Hu-guette Leblanc, is proudrof her -and she shows you her work. u- One of the special things Mercedes--has done is a colored drawing and Mrsl Leblanc is especially proud of this. The bottom half of the page is taken up by part of a world It is liberally sprinkled with childish car- icatures of From the top of the page, a man looks down on the world.

The man is God. The people below are His children. "I never realized how attached you can become to a child who is not your own," Leblanc says. This is the way it should be for all little girls. But maybe especially for 'li' Til Eager to learn, Mercedes practises using teapot with Mrs.

Denise Cdti, head oj the Montreal Rehabilitation Institute's prosthetic training unit. vV; -Vt' 2 Weekend Utigmzine Feb. 1S, 1MB little girls who have no arms. Only little hands that protrude below the shoulders. Mercedes is a victim of a drug tragedy.

When her mother was pregnant, she took thalidomide to prevent nausea and help her sleep. And like more 100 other Canadian children born in 1963 of mothers who had taken the Mercedes came into the worid deformed. But you must never feel sorry for Mercedes. And if you do, you must not show it. She has to be accepted in the world as just another human being, capable of competing with the physically normal.

lt is important that you see the child as she is and not as' she should be," says Dr. Maurice Mongeau, chief of staff of the Montreal Rehabilitation Institute which has been caring for. 40 of the Canadian mide cases. balance of the children are under supervision of the Manitoba Rehabilitation Centre in Winnipeg and the Crippled Children's Centre in Rehabilitation of the thalidomide youngsters began with the fitting of prosthesis, or mechanical limbs arms for the armless like Mercedes; and legs for the legless. But it soon became apparent that mechanicjjlaids alone would not be enough "What the children needed above all" says Dr.

Mongeau, "was the love and understanding of the people in their lives. They had to be accepted." Acceptance was not an easy matter in many cases and Dr. Mongeau remembers, only too weO how some of the deformed babies were immediately set aside as freaks. He remem-, bers, too, the superstitions that surrounded some of them at birth. "You went to the zoo you were pregnant and that is why' your child was born deformed," a distraught thalidomide mother quoted a neighbor in ah outlying Quebec community as having told her.

"Don't go near any pregnant women because you, may transmit your curse to them," another mother reported a 'friend as" having warned her. "it was' to break through the prejudices of an often hostile world that the Montreal institute decided in 1963 to launch a 20-year program of rehabilitation for the children. It was a unique plan designed not only to help the child adjust to the world but also to help the parents adjust to the child. -'Some people couldn't see the child says Dr. Mongeau.

"They could only see the malformation. And this is why we had to work with the They had to understand the 1 problems of their children. They had to know how to answer their questions, how to handle their frustra- tiOnS." iJl-'f': 'fc' Dr. Mongeau calls this "treating the family" and "over the past five years a staff of psychologists and social workers have helped parents over a wide range of 'psychological Last fall, as the children came of school age, the "plan was extended to cover teachers. They had to be shown how to help i pupils with: their prosthesis and like the parents, how to cope with questions.

Mrs. Leblanc, for example faced up to questions the first day Mer-. cedes came to class. Mercedes wore her prosthesis for -writing and later took it off for drawing, which she usually likes to do with her own little.