- +18177039953
- info@theiredefoundation.com
- 5A, Gwynns Mills Court, Owing Mills, MD, 21117
In 2009, Crystal Chigbu gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Beulah. Hours after Beulah was born, the doctors told Crystal and her husband that their daughter was born with a rare congenital limb deformity known as tibial hemimelia. This caused Beulah to have a missing bone in her right leg and kneecap, with the implication of this medical condition being that Beulah’s affected leg had to be amputated and she would need a prosthetic limb.
Hearing this news left Crystal and her husband distraught and unsure of how to handle the situation with the taboo and discrimination around disability in Nigeria and Africa at large, making it worse as this news was not received well by both their families, with a lot of finger pointing and accusations on what or who might have been the cause. After a lot of deliberation, Crystal and her husband decided to amputate Buelah’s affected leg at 27 months, and she has had to use a prosthetic limb ever since.
Crystal then began to blog about her experience, and this led her to encounter the mother of a double lower limb amputee in 2012, for whom she raised funds to get both prostheses for the child, helping him to go back to school and allowing his mother to go back to work. This experience lit in her a desire to help more child amputees and their families, and to this effect, she founded The IREDE Foundation in 2012 in Nigeria.
