The foreign legion:
Clearly the work of BMVSS endears itself to everyone worldwide. It has spread to 18 countries. In several of them the people whom it helped were land-mine victims. As this story goes online, ten tonnes of materials have been packed ready for a camp in Pakistan. It will be a new frontier to be conquered by love. That will surely happen, going by the following report in a Pakistani paper, on the effect a Jaipur foot camp had in Afghanistan:
From Dawn, Jan 19, 2002
"As aid pours into Afghanistan, a special consignment from India is probably bringing more happiness to Kabul than the rest of the world's cargo combined. Low-tech, cheap and rubbery it may be, but it will transform the lives of Afghans who, after two decades of war, have had one or both legs blown off by land mines. The consignment consists of 1,000 pieces of the Jaipur foot, a prosthesis named after the city where it was developed in 1970. It was taken on a special Indian air force plane to Kabul earlier this month.
"As goodwill gestures go, it has probably earned India more appreciation than any amount of diplomacy. News that the Jaipur foot was coming to town, broadcast on radio and television, prompted desperate amputees on crutches to lay siege to the newly opened Indian embassy. "Thousands of Afghans applied for it. I was taken aback at the tremendous response," says SK Lambah, the special envoy sent to Afghanistan recently by India."
The Mehta brothers are unlikely to be surprised, though. Only quietly satisfied.
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Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti
D R Mehta, Founder and Chief Patron
S R Mehta, Secretary
SMS Hospital Campus,
Jaipur -302004, Rajasthan
Phones:[0091][141] 2563063; 5062227
email:bmvssjpr@datainfosys.net
Website: http://www.jaipurfoot.org
To express your intent to donate, click here
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April, 2006