19-year-old living in bowl isn’t letting condition stop her from dreaming big

Rahma Haruna likes to dream big. The Nigerian teen hopes to open a store that sells everything one day. In the meantime until that dream becomes a reality, Rahma tries to be content with her bleak circumstances.

At the moment, she relies on her family for everything. Family members do everything from feeding her, bathing her, and transporting her. While Rahma’s situation sounds like the situation of countless numbers of people, hers is a little different. 

She depends on her family for everything because she has an illness that caused her arms and legs to stop growing when she was six months old. Now that Rahma is 19 years old, she has an adult-sized head on a toddler-sized torso. Because she is so small, her family carries her around in a plastic bowl. Every day Rahma’s brother takes her from their village into nearby city Kano to beg, the Telegraph reported.

No one in Rahma’s family knows why she is deformed. Her mother said in a Barcroft TV interview that Rahma was born healthy, but at around the six month mark she got a fever and started having gastrointestinal issues. After that, her limbs stopped growing. Rahma’s father, a farmer and day laborer estimates that he has spent more than 1 million Nigerian Naira (about $3,000/2,690 Euro) trying to get answers about her affliction. The best the doctors could come up with was that she was cursed by evil spirits. Rahma’s family has welcomed the press to tell her story because they are hoping a medical charity will help Rahma with her special needs.