HOPE AFTER WAR

Wivine Mukata was a casualty of the DRC violence – but now she makes artificial limbs which allow other victims to lead normal lives

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TWAS an ordinary day for the teenager - or as ordinary as days could be for a kid growing up in an epicentre of chaos and violence.

Wivine Mukata was preparing fish soup for her family, moving around the kitchen and stirring pots, when the house suddenly exploded, another casualty of a war that had devastated the lives of the people of North Kivu province in the eastern DRC.

Fourteen-year-old Wivine's leg was so badly damaged in the attack it had to be amputated above the knee.

A photograph from that time, nearly 12 years ago, is a reminder of Wivine's long recovery - it shows her sitting in a wheelchair, her left leg wrapped in a white bandage.

She was first treated at the Shirika la Umoja orthopaedic centre in Goma, the largest city in the region, and then at a facility in Bukavu where she was given a prosthetic limb.

Wivine’s new leg changed the course of her life. Instead of going into computer science as she'd planned, she became an ortho-prosthetist, designing artificial limbs as well as braces and splints for those who have suffered injuries like hers - and every year, there are hundreds of patients.

"There was a dad I'll never forget," she says. “He lost both legs, a double amputee.

"When I saw him for the first time wearing his prosthesis, he was happy and I said to myself, 'I have to do this, to put smiles back on the faces of people with disabilities and victims of everything that is happening in Congo'."

She completed her training in Togo in December last year just as another cycle of violence erupted in the region which has been upended by conflict since the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

In January the M23 armed group seized the cities of Goma and Bukavu in an offensive that has killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands in one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises.