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span class="inline inline-left">Appendages: These prosthetic limbs and mobility aids — made and given freely to disabled people by the YAKKUM Prosthetic Workshop and Clinic — offer people the chance to rebuild their lives.“You have two choices — lose the leg or lose your son.”

These were words that collapsed upon then 17-year-old Ketut Nesa, laying semiconscious in a hospital bed in Tabanan, Bali.  

The high school student a week before had been thrown from the back of a motorbike; his right leg broken he was left for dead on the side of the road.

“I was riding on the back of a friend’s modified motorbike. The bike was very low and I am tall so my leg was sticking out. My leg was clipped by a car’s bumper and I was thrown from the bike. The car drove away and my friend didn’t know I had been thrown until he was some kilometers down the road and he wondered why I wasn’t answering his questions,” says Nesa of the opening string of collisions that ended in the amputation of his right leg.

These collisions of fate included a 5-kilometer motorbike ride with a broken leg over potholed roads to the nearest hospital, then a panicked rush in a family car to a better equipped hospital and a long wait at a hospital emergency room. It would be more than eight hours from accident to treatment for the 17-year-old.

“I realized my leg was broken when I tried to stand after the accident, which was before my friend got back. I thought it would be easy to heal, just a broken leg. All the way to that first hospital the broken ends of the bone were banging together. I could feel [the break] the whole time — it was pain beyond pain, I was conscious the whole trip,” says Nesa of the accident that was to become the turning point in his life.

The loss of his leg and then his girlfriend at the time shattered Nesa’s confidence. “After the amputation I felt I could accept it and by the time I got home I was happy to be there, but I then realized when I lost my leg I lost also my girlfriend,”

Nesa shut down for a year, refusing to leave home except to go to school. “When I felt my life again, it was when I got my new leg. That was six months after the accident and my parents bought a prosthetic leg from Solo. For two weeks I refused to use the leg — it hung on my wall — I just wanted my own leg back. Then I got to thinking how much money and sacrifice my parents had made to get that [prosthetic leg] so I started exercising with it. I was doing really well – I really wanted to walk. Then I went to school. My friends all said, “Wow! Your leg has grown back.”  

A decade on and Nesa, happily married with a baby on the way, is surrounded by a mountain of feet, legs, braces, orthopedic shoes and a myriad of other mobility aids that help put people, literally, back on their feet.

As coordinator of YAKKUM Bali’s Prosthetic Workshop and Clinic, Nesa has become a sculptor of limbs at the Aseman, Badung center.  

YAKKUM Bali is modeled on the Yogyakarta YAKKUM, and makes and supplies free of charge mobility aids, wheelchairs, prostheses and skills training for the disabled. More than 95 percent of YAKKUM staff are, like Nesa, disabled in some way.

YAKKUM Bali administrative officer Sang Ayu was struck by polio as a child. She is a robust energetic young woman who bounds up the office stairs assisted by crutches. “I am really proud. Ninety-five percent of our staff has a disability. Our philosophy is ‘from us to us by us’. The point is we can train [the disabled], educate you, that’s why it’s important to be disabled as staff here. We have the heart,” says Ayu.

This sense of heart, of walking in another’s shoes, blossoms when Nesa speaks of making and fitting prosthetic limbs for amputees, most of whom are under 25 years of age, male and have lost a limb in a motorbike crash.

Workshop: Mobility aid craftsman Komang Sumerta builds a leg brace while workshop coordinator Ketut Nesa (back) adjusts a prosthetic limb.“Every prosthesis is individually made for each client. After the legs are ready for fitting, I don’t stop adjusting the prosthesis until I see the client smile. I can see it in their faces. They want so much to rush home with their new leg, but if it’s not an exact fit the leg would be useless. It can take three days of adjustments for the leg to fit perfectly, but if it’s not right then it’s no good. So until their smile is shining I know the prosthesis still needs adjusting. It’s in their face. It’s like if someone eats a lemon and says it’s sweet, the words say one thing but their face says another,” says Nesa, who made his own new prosthetic leg.

His intimate understanding of how it feels to lose a limb and the deeper knowledge that life is not over, that it has simply changed, offers enormous hope to other amputees.

Tall and handsome with a shock of glossy black curls and just the hint of a limp, Nesa stands as a role model for others.

“I think I can help because people see I can walk and they know they can too,” says Nesa.

Ayu goes further. “Some people say Nesa is like a god. Before meeting him they cry all the time, then they see Nesa and their lives begin again,” says Ayu of a young man who is giving others a new leg to stand on.