A great man once said that it is not what happens that makes us who we are, but it’s how we learn to live with whatever happens to us when we did not expect it.
He is called Thomas.
He is 18 years old.
She is called fralence, the mother to Thomas, whose life was ruined by the size of his belly and limits him from doing anything in the society, just like any other child should.
Florence says that in this community, a lot of people keep bullying her son by saying that he is pregnant, yet he is a boy because of his belly that looks this big and, according to her, they completely have no idea where this came from.
She says that this situation started some time back, when Thomas was just 15 years old and his body mysteriously started misbehaving when the legs, the head, the private parts and the belly as well all got swollen at once, and they all wondered what was happening to him.
According to florence, this is when their life became a total disaster, because it is when Thomas’s father died when they needed him the most, because she always thought of how she was going to ever manage to afford their sense treatment alone, since she also had no job.
She tried taking Thomas to the hospital and it was very expensive, and she had to sell everything she had, including her own house that they lived in, so that her son can get treatment, which was helpful for quite some time but did not last forever, because at some point she totally ran out of money.
Thomas spends a lot of time in serious pain because of this belly, sleepless nights and a lot of fear of ever getting into the society, since they all laugh at him and start calling him names, which hurts him a lot and builds up a lot of negativity into him.
When the situation got worse, she started thinking that it was witchcraft.
She went to a wizard who took all the little money she had, but nothing was getting better.
She was advised to keep taking her son to the hospital because this disease was not anything spiritual.