Palestinian boy came to Dearborn Heights for a prosthetic leg and got chance to be a kid

There was a click, and for the first time in two years, 8-year-old Saleh Humaid stood on two legs. Everyone in the room played it cool, but the buzz of anticipation for his first steps on the new prosthetic was nearly palpable.

That July morning was a crescendo for Saleh and the small crowd that held its breath to see him walk again. Now back home in the violence-torn Gaza Strip that cost him his leg, this key moment came weeks after Saleh had been measured and fitted in a prosthetic shop in Detroit for his new limb.

Before grasping the parallel bars set in front of him, he acknowledged haltingly translated instructions on pulling up the sock and easing out the wrinkles, on rolling up the liner and cleaning it with soap and water. He practiced pulling the liner into place, struggling with sweaty hands while Yasmeen Hamed, the woman who for nearly two months had filled in for a mother 6,000 miles away, stopped herself from helping him.

“The mom in me wants to do it for him,” Hamed said, almost forcing her body to turn away from Saleh and his clammy hands while her eyes stayed trained on his attempts.

Saleh has been preceded by more than 2,000 kids whom the Palestinian Children’s Relief Foundation has taken overseas for medical treatment over 32 years. The Michigan chapter, led by Hamed, has hosted seven of them.

Saleh lived with Hamed and her family in Dearborn Heights during his nine-week U.S. stay, waiting for his custom-made prosthetic to be ready while the large community of Palestinian and other Arab Americans rallied around him.

After this day, only two weeks remain for him in Michigan for rehab, to make sure the fit is perfect, to practice putting his new leg on and off. He's caught on quickly — the liner is up, the prosthetic is on, Saleh is standing. Click.

Now it’s time to walk. Saleh's smile takes up most of his face as he begins. Right foot, left foot. Right foot, left foot. Yes. It’s working. He’s walking again.

Trying to help children, one by one

Steve Sosebee was a recent college graduate in the late 1980s who up and moved to the Middle East, working as a journalist in the West Bank and Jerusalem and reporting on the first intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israeli troops in 1987-93.

The conflict may have been ignited by men. But its flames fanned out to every Palestinian family. Of the estimated 5,000 people who were wounded in the first two years of the uprising, more than half were children.

Sosebee saw children with gunshot wounds, broken bones, amputated limbs. Few of them could access the surgical care they’d need in order to heal. He started arranging treatment for them in the U.S., one by one.

Soon he realized one twenty-something American just starting his career wasn’t going to be able to meet the great need. But he could create something that would try.

‘It gave me a sense of purpose’

Hamed was 14 years old in 1990, when Sosebee sent the first children overseas to receive medical treatment in her Ohio hometown. A girl arrived with shattered bones in her legs, alongside her brother, who had no legs at all anymore, and was missing one arm.

The siblings stayed in Hamed’s home, with her parents watching over them as they received surgeries and care. It made a big impression. “It shaped me, as a child, to see that,” Hamed said.

Years later, after Hamed had grown up and gotten married and moved to Michigan, she was nursing a newborn and keeping herself awake by scrolling Facebook. Was it the fatigue and emotion of having this new life in her arms that made a post from the Palestinian Children’s Relief Foundation resonate with her maternal soul? Sosebee’s nonprofit, grown up as Hamed had, was casting about for someone in its network to take in a child for two weeks so he could receive medical care.

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Being of Palestinian descent, Hamed always kept an eye on what was going on over there. But it wasn’t always obvious what she could do to help. This request — to open her home to an innocent child who needed her — tugged at her heartstrings as the baby she nursed tugged on a strand of her hair.

“You see so much happening over there and your hands are tied, but this is a way to do something,” Hamed said. “It gave me a sense of purpose.”

‘I don’t think anybody could turn a blind eye’

Besides the children who have gotten overseas treatment, the Palestinian Children’s Relief Foundation has sent thousands of medical professionals from various countries to the Middle East and has built two pediatric cancer departments, a pediatric intensive care unit and a cardiology department.

Only children whose injuries cannot be healed locally are sponsored for treatment in the U.S. Their injuries are not caused only by conflict, though some have been the victims of that particular brand of tragedy.

Urgent needs listed on the organization's website include specialized formula for a baby in the West Bank, an orthotic for a 6-year-old with cerebral palsy, cancer tests for a 4-year-old girl, eyeglasses for a little girl in Lebanon and hearing aids for another.

Children may receive care regardless of their nationality, politics or religion.

After the first two children came to Michigan, Hamed founded a state chapter of the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. She didn’t know exactly what she was doing at first, wasn’t sure who to involve or how.

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But most people who live near Detroit know that when it comes to the Arab community, this is an epicenter. And to many Arab Americans, community matters. Between 600 and 750 people now attend the annual fundraiser Hamed throws to benefit the nonprofit and the kids it helps.

Together, they’ve raised money to send doctors overseas, sponsored children living in an orphanage and contributed to the construction of those two pediatric oncology centers.

It’s just the little bit of way they’ve found to give back, she said.

“Everybody’s so amazing,” Hamed said. “And it’s not just the Arabs. I mean, obviously they’re the ones that are invested a bit, but when you’re dealing with a child, I don’t think anybody could turn a blind eye to it.”

It mattered to Saleh's mother, Kholoud Abu Humaid, that he would be hosted by a Palestinian family in America. She said it was a relief to her — that it lessened her anxiety about sending her son halfway around the world.

Sosebee said placing Saleh into the heart of the Arab American community is part of his healing.

“If you don't have a community structure in place to make him feel welcome, to give him the social, psychological and cultural support that he needs to go through this journey … you won't be successful,” he said. “It is as important or even more important than the actual treatment that he's getting.”

The center of Arab American community

Arabs began migrating to metro Detroit in the waning years of the 19th century, lured as so many immigrants are by the promise of employment. They worked as peddlers and shopkeepers until the burgeoning auto industry offered jobs on the line. Syrians, Lebanese, Chaldeans from modern-day Iraq and later refugees from that country, Yemenis and Jordanians have all settled in Detroit and its suburbs.

The metro area is considered to have the greatest local concentration of Arab Americans in the U.S., and with 190,000 Arabic speakers, easily outstrips New York City and Los Angeles linguistically. In Dearborn, at least 42% of the population is Arab American.

Like any community, they are not a monolith. But Hamed has seen how people of all faiths and backgrounds can unite in support of a child. And it seems especially easy to rally around a kid like Saleh.

A few weeks after his arrival, Hamed organized a meet and greet for him in Dearborn Heights, where his shy smile and single-digit list of English words were on display — along with the space below his right knee where the bottom portion of his leg is conspicuously missing.

Though everyone knew better than to ask him about it over their plates of chicken shawarma and fries, Saleh's leg was bombarded with shrapnel in May 2021 from an exploding car that he and his dad happened to be passing in the road as it was targeted by a drone strike.

The damage to his nerves was too severe to repair and surgeons in the Gaza Strip could not save his limb.

Hamed rushed over to make sure he wasn't questioned about what happened. He moans in his sleep and has night terrors — traumatized by what he has endured, she said, protecting him from additional pain as any mother would. The missing tibia is simply this little boy’s most visible war wound.

A lesson for our children

Parents brought their children to Saleh's meet and greet — kids who have never known war or hunger or chronic fear.

“It’s good for them to see how lucky they are,” Hamed said of her own children. Her expansive Arab American circle seems to agree that exposing their kids to the reality that they are privileged to live in the U.S. is another benefit of helping children like Saleh.

“We want to teach our kids how to give charity,” said Danielle Elzayat, who, along with her husband, Amad, also leads the Amity Foundation, a grassroots organization that helps needy families in the area. She takes an expansive view of community. Though geographically she said it consists of people living in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, in practice “it’s anyone who lives here, works here or practices their faith or culture here.”

“We’re always happy to expand the community — that’s more lives touched, more families reached,” Elzayat said. “Something like this, I don’t care what community you come from, what country, what faith practice, helping a child is just human.”

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Saleh sits munching on his party food as guests arrive to meet him. Does he have expectations for his time here? No, he says with a smile.

How does he feel about coming to the U.S.? Excited. The plane ride was cool.

What does he want to do while he’s here? He’d like to go swimming.

Swimming? This kid has no idea what's in store for him. Before he had even disembarked the plane, Hamed and a wide circle of community members had plotted ways to make his summer utterly unforgettable.

Life is hard in Gaza City, where Saleh lives with his parents, three brothers and a sister in the Gaza Strip, an impoverished Palestinian district run by Hamas, a group the U.S. has designated a terrorist entity. Its population is reliant on international aid, as Gaza has been under a blockade for 16 years.

The international nongovernmental organization Save the Children said last year that 80% of the children living in the Gaza Strip report feeling fearful, nervous, sad or grieving. More than half of them have contemplated suicide and six out of 10 are self-harming.

Community members in Dearborn Heights and the larger area worked to make Saleh’s time in the U.S. more than a medical success. They wanted to show him a good time, give him experiences he’d never get the chance to enjoy at home and allow him to just be a kid enjoying life.

To be more precise, for two months, they set out to spoil him rotten.

Helping these kids humbles you

Nour Saker gets involved whenever a child arrives for treatment through the Detroit chapter of the PCRF, for which she serves as a board member and social media coordinator. She still keeps in touch with Muath Abudaher, a Palestinian kid who stayed with Hamed a decade ago to receive a prosthetic leg after he’d lost his own to bone cancer.

Saker would pick up Muath from school every Friday and take him to Burger King for a hamburger and a Sprite. Meat is a luxury in the Gaza Strip. He was so happy to be with her and go out for that treat. “You see how excited they get over the smallest things,” Saker said.

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Saker said her heart would break when Muath would pull out the photograph he’d tucked into his wallet, of his mother who had died from cancer when he was little. Muath would also tell her about his home. To hear him talk, you’d think he lived in a house in Bloomfield Hills, she remembers.

When she saw where he lived over FaceTime after Muath went home, she realized it was just a shack in a refugee camp.

Helping kids like Muath and Saleh — it just humbles you, Saker said. “You really can’t complain about life.”

Giving one child a summer to remember

Saker took Saleh to see "The Little Mermaid" a few weeks after his arrival, as he started to warm up to people and feel more at ease. He was so excited just to be seeing a movie in the theater, she said. His eyes practically bugged out when she bought him popcorn, cotton candy and a slushie.

Maybe he got used to it once his head was full of memories from not one but two trips to Cedar Point amusement park, the flashing blare of Dave and Busters — even an afternoon spent jumping off a boat and ripping away on jet skis. A summer to remember by anyone’s standards.

Humaid said in a telephone interview that she called her son every day and he always sounded not just happy, but joyful.

As back-to-school sales started, Hamed and Sosebee began corresponding about flight options. Saleh has endured more than most but he’s still only 8 years old; they arranged for him to fly with a group of nurses, so he wouldn’t be all alone on the long trip back to the Middle East.

It’s possible he’ll return to the U.S. The owners of Anew Life Prosthetics and Orthotics, where Saleh received his new leg, say they’ll gladly have him back in a few years once he has outgrown his current prosthetic if the PCRF can get him here.

He’ll be walking into a future full of uncertainty and hardship, but he has an outsize cheering section and support team. "We are literally changing this boy’s life and he’s going to remember us forever,” said Hamed.

Saying goodbye to Saleh

A few days before Saleh's departure date, Hamed checks her phone to see a message from someone asking whether she can send Saleh home with a new laptop. They’ll have to pay for him to fly with an extra suitcase to fit all the clothes and toys people have sent and given him. Supporters who found out about Saleh have mailed him money, gifts, Batman pajamas.

There could be even more tonight; the family is throwing him a surprise birthday party, even though he won't turn 9 until September. They really want to give him the experience of blowing out birthday candles, grinning over another year gone by and another one ahead.

Hamed is sitting in “her spot” on patio furniture at her longtime friend Hiba Kassem’s house, keeping a vigilant eye on Saleh splashing in the backyard pool and hurling himself onto swan-shaped floaties.

Saleh has gotten close with his host siblings and with Kassem’s kids. Her daughters bawled when he walked in on two legs for the first time. Now Kassem’s son Omar Alfasih is horsing around with Saleh in the pool.

His vocabulary has grown a little over the weeks. Omar has him in stitches and Saleh keeps exclaiming “Oh my God,” as he giggles and copies the older boy’s wild leaps into the water.

Saleh climbs up into the cushion of a giant inflatable swan and basks in the sun, the rippling wake of Omar’s last cannonball nudging him incrementally farther away. He’ll be leaving the pool soon, then the house and finally the country and this American summer.

He says something quietly, and Omar responds: “I love you, too.”

Jennifer Brookland covers child welfare for the Detroit Free Press in partnership with Report for America. Reach her at jbrookland@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Palestinian nonprofit brings boy to Dearborn Heights for new leg