Tonio's trouble
This is a request for help, on behalf of an exceptional, resourceful, hard-working but abandoned kid that I met 13 years ago. Antonio was a great example of what you can do with the right mind-set, but has been struck by debilitating arthritis of the hip, and needs $5,500 of hip replacement surgery. He lives in Mozambique, and currently earns less than $200 a month, must pay rent and medication and support a family.
Lots of people around the world need help, and I try to help as many as I can from paying for boarding school education for two girls in Uganda, donations to charities, fundraising through sponsored events, hurricane relief to Dominica, giving time to set up and promote various projects in Africa and PNG (this page https://www.indigosafaris.com/giving-back.html has more info) but this fella, Antonio, is a gem. Below you can find the story of how I met him in 2004, it’s a bit long in meme-obsessed 2017, but I’d appreciate it if you could take the time to read it. If you haven't got the time, just go here and make a donation.
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We had first bumped into Claire and Simon outside the Mozambican consulate in Swaziland when we were applying for our visas. They were on their second visit to Tofo having spent seven months there the previous year, and had come back to capitalise on the South African holidaymakers who buy a lot of the seashell jewellery that they made. Simon was a tall, slightly-built north Londoner with dreadlocks looking, if not quite like Jesus, then Brian of Monty Python fame. Claire also had dreads and with her pointy nose and new age clothes would pass for a modern-day sorceress. She was on the ninth year of an internal voyage of spiritual discovery, was a Reiki healer and had met Simon four years previously whilst travelling around southern Africa.
The beach at Tofo is host to a motley crew of vendors, mainly kids, touting fish, mats, paintings, baskets, bows and arrows, conch shells and the like. On our second day one little lad stood out from, if not above, the others. Antonio’s proud and upright bearing, his keen eye and charming wide-mouthed smile created an aura that was hard to miss. He’d be on the beach early, starting with a cup of coffee at the backpackers, and would wind up the afternoon taking on a tourist or two at pool despite being barely able to reach some of the shots without using an upturned beer crate. He looked about nine, albeit a very independent and self-sufficient nine. His brother Raphael, two years his elder, also made and sold a bit of jewellery and did odd jobs when he found them.
I found out they had been abandoned by their mother five or six years before and that Antonio was living with another family, whilst Raphael was roughing it. During their previous seven-month stay, Claire and Simon had taught them their trade in the afternoons when the boys had finished school and fed them when business was slow. Prior to that they had been making 30p a day selling baskets and chilli bites for someone else, now Antonio was making 10 times that, often more. The average unskilled Mozambican adult who has an employer and doesn’t rely on subsistence farming earns £30 a month. Both were bright kids and good English speakers by local standards, Antonio coming top of his class the previous year.
I couldn’t figure out how he was going to school and working on the beach all day, coming into the bar to buy a sandwich and a coke at lunchtime. One evening he saw me on the laptop typing away and seemed interested. I asked him if he wanted to see some photos of African animals and his eyes lit up when he saw a hippo. I sat him down and gave him the mouse, and showed him how to move on to the next photo, zoom in, zoom out, and go to another file. In no time, he was moving through our holiday snaps pretty much on his own. It transpired that neither of them had been allowed back to school since the new school year started in December because they needed some paperwork that only their mother, whose whereabouts were only known to be somewhere in the district of Zavala 150 to 200k to the south, could provide.
I put it to Simon that we take the boys and try and to find her. The next day was a Sunday, so I figured we might find her at church, if we could find her village, and I put my dog-collar shirt on to make our little posse look a bit less out of the ordinary.
I have been a reverend of the Universal Life Church of Modesto, California since my sister's first marriage in 1997. She emailed me some wedding pics from the big day in the North Carolina mountains where she was joined in matrimony to a Seminole Indian 28 years her elder known as Marion Skydancer by a woman in a shockingly bright red dress with a flame pattern cut into the hem and a matching bandana tied kamikaze style. When I enquired as to what type of crackpot preacher had conducted the ceremony she told me that the fiery kamikaze was a ULC minister, and that she was also ordained, having taken the title of goddess. That she wanted to marry this grey-haired old bloater who looked about 70 I could just about understand. That she had changed her name to the equivalent of "Swims like an otter" I could believe. But that you could get ordained on-line for free was beyond even my evening rum-tasting-enhanced gullibility. I checked it out on-line and approximately four minutes later my rum-tasting-enhanced curiosity meant that I too was an ordained minister of the ULC with the power to marry any couple of nutters that I could find willing to allow me to do so in 30-something US states. So before setting out on my round the world trip in May 2004, I had added a pair of dog-collar shirts to my wardrobe.
Given Simon’s messiah-like appearance (despite him pointing out that Africans might consider the Holy Saviour to be black), I thought teaming it with me in my dog collar could be of help. On the way down Antonio said he was 12 or 13, and whilst Raffy might pass for 15, just, Tohinio (little Tony) would be hard pushed to get any Dutch girl to believe that he was only one year away from being a legal shag.
We drove through the main town of Zavala area, Quissico, and Simon said that he thought that it was called Zavala. The boys shook their heads, and said to go further on. At the next village locals told us it was further south still. After 200k and nearly three hours driving on a road that had become considerably worse after five days of rain, compared to our drive up a week before, we were at the southernmost limit of the Zavala district. We didn’t have a lot to go on, and winning the lottery looked easier that finding a woman called Joanna who had happened to abandon her first two kids. A miracle would have been handy as the rain started to pour down. The crowds were asking the bemused Simon/Jesus to show them a sign. Simon/Jesus looked at his feet. I looked out the window to contemplate the impossibility of asking every person on the road for the next 50 or 60k if they knew a Joanna who’d told them she’d ditched a couple of her offspring. I saw a bus with Zavala written on it. A sign, a sign! All the true believers follow the bus!
After three stops in 10k, each one lasting several minutes whilst the ticket collector scrambled onto the roof in the lashing rain to unstrap bags piled up there, we asked the bus driver where Zavala was. 25k, Senor. Exactly 25k later was a village. Was this it, we enquired. Nine kilometres further on, Senor. Nine kilometres later we were back in Quissico. The church was closed, but at the end of the street was a police station and store, both proclaiming to be in Zavala town. Our luck was on the up.
The first bloke we asked knew someone who might know. We walked over to his hut. He didn’t know, but after much repeating of “Jo-hanna” (I blame Eddy Grant) and protracted sucking of air through the teeth, chin scratching and head shaking, he mentioned a man who worked out of the village who might know. We strolled down the road through the market and over to his hut. He knew two “Jo-hannas”, both outside the village. He and the boys threw a few names and dates around and he settled on the one who lived to the north. Unfortunately, he only had a vague idea where she might live. He called over his neighbour who had lived there longer, and Simon, Tohino, Raff, the three blokes and the neighbour walked back to the car back through the centre in loose procession formation, accompanied by a few stares and laughs from the locals. We thanked the first two blokes who stayed in town, whilst the last chap and his neighbour got in the truck and we headed north. After a couple of kilometres they directed us off the road and down a dirt track towards a lagoon. Five minutes later they pulled us over in front of a hut. The owner, a well-built, stern-looking fellow, had met Johanna once as she lived near his cousin. He changed out of his Sunday best and took us back to the main road, with the truck now seven up.
Three kilometres further north we turned back onto a rutted sand track that twisted through the palm trees until it started to peter out. I stopped at what would reasonably pass for the end of the line. Stern cousin-of-friend insisted it was still the road, just a bit overgrown. He got out, kicked a few of the piled-up cut-off palm tree branches and bushes, grunted “Sim sim”, and got back in.
“Is it far?” Raffy translated.
“30 minutes’ walk to my cousin’s”.
We ground over and through the undergrowth, not wanting to go off the “track” and into the adjoining crops, especially as the owner was tending to them with a rusty machete. After a couple of hundred metres the obstacles cleared and on we went to the cousin’s home. She piled in and the two boys made room by standing on the back bumper and holding on to the roof bar. 800 metres later we pulled up next to a field and a clearing where two young boys and a girl were running around. When we had debussed Mr Stern cracked a big grin and told the kids to say hello to their brothers and sister. We were there. Job half-done. Now, how would mum react to her abandoned kids turning up with four locals and a couple of ‘murungos’ (a pejorative term for a whitey) or ‘blancos’ - one a barefooted Saviour impersonator and the other a man of the cloth in fancy running shoes?
The newly found siblings ran off with Antonio, who was no longer little Tony, to find their mother. Raff sat under the mango trees with us as another couple of blokes pitched up. We suggested that Raff go on down the track.
“She’s got to come to me now”. Fair shout.
It was now gone three, and we had a good two-hour drive back through the potholes; I really didn’t want to drive at night again, but how could I rush this along. Eventually the kids returned with mum in tow, shaking her head laughing and beaming as she caught sight of us. A handshake to each of us was followed by an apology that she had nothing to offer. Raphael didn’t take the hand proffered but pointed at his progenitor’s bulging midriff with a stick and said she must be eating well. Another brother or sister she said. She was no slacker when it came to procreation as this would be the 5th since leaving the boys in Tofo, having lost one just after birth on top of the three we’d just met.
Sunset was now 90 minutes away, and Tonio decided to stay so he could get his certificate on Monday, rather than wait for his mum to get round to acquiring it and posting it so that he could go back to school straight away. Raff couldn’t start again until December, so he was in no rush. We left Tonio some money for the paperwork, the bus, and a present for his mother and we said our goodbyes. As he thanked us, all I could offer in return was a weak grin with eyes clenched and lump in my throat. He and Raff engaged in some affectionate brotherly arsing about on the back bumper as a beaming ex-Mr. Stern showed us a shorter way back. We dropped Stern and Tonio off, then all that was left was another eye-straining, ring-twitching 150k drive in the twilight.
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A week later I left Tofo, and continued my travels. This was all pre-Facebook. I thought about the boys, hoped they were doing OK, finished a round the world trip, got the wife pregnant, moved to South Africa, became a dad, got into UW photojournalism, got divorced, liven in Holland for a bit, and then flipped back into Nomad mode in late 2008. In May 2009 I was back in Tofo to write an article.
In the meantime, Tohinio had also been busy.
The people who were housing him, the owners of Dino’s Beach Bar, Dino and Nathalie, had unofficially adopted him, he’d become their 3rd son. He had excelled at school, graduating in general accounting and insurance management, he was on his way to becoming a martial arts instructor. In 2008, Dino passed away unexpectedly, and Nathalie found herself with kids aged 3 and 8 and bar with 30 employees open 20 hours a day, in shock and unable to cope. Up stepped Antonio, aged 17, and according to Nathalie, basically took over everything. Organised the kids, sorted out the bar, got things happening. And there he was in 2009, mixing drinks and music, ever more curious about what all the divers were interested in. Unsurprisingly he learnt to dive, and became a diver master (as did Raffy), and combined the bar work with diving, and generally being super-switched on an active, and started a family.
Until 2013, when the arthritis started, aged 22. Unable to dive, soon unable to work behind a bar, he had to move to Maputo to get a desk job for Movitel, the Moz cell phone network. Now he uses crutches to get about. He can’t carry anything. And, in short, he will be spending 2-3rd of his income on pain management meds until he wins the lottery to pay for surgery. Nathalie can’t help, as the cyclone that ravaged the coast in February this year did not spare the bar or her guesthouse. The guesthouse was destroyed, the bar repairs have taken the savings she had.
I probably haven’t done a great job of expressing why I think Tonio is more deserving than a whole bunch of other great causes out there. He’s not going to save the world from death by plastic, or fix the North Korean problem (but has a better chance than I do), but he always has had something. A spark, a magnetism. He is 100% trustworthy, dependable, amazingly self-reliant, quick to learn, to get things done. But all that promise is wrecked by his arthritis. People like Antonio are in short supply, especially in Mozambique. I truly believe that he will be able to do many more good things in the future, if he can get this op done.
Three weeks ago, in desperation, he launched a Go Fund Me appeal to raise the $5,500. So far he has $900 pledged. After a good start, donations have stalled. This is where you can help.
I can put in a quarter of what’s missing, $1100, I’m looking for kindly souls I know to put their hand in their pocket and help out, quickly, so less money is spent on monthly meds. I would also like to collect the money myself, and pay the bills directly as Go Fund Me take 8.5%.
If you want to make a small donation, best do it here https://www.gofundme.com/mq2sh-hip-...
If you can give $100 or more, best send it to me and I will get it to Tonio.
While he is convalescing, I am going to employ him to do some video editing and website work for me. I don’t know if he’s ever done any, but I bet he’ll pick it up in a day. That way he can still support his family whilst recovering and I’m sure I can find other work for him to do before he can get back in the water and do the job he loves.
If you can’t, or have other priority causes you believe are more beneficial, I totally understand; there are limits to what most of us can reasonably give. But if you could help out on this one, you would be giving a life back to a wonderful person, that will have knock-on effects down the line.
Lots of people around the world need help, and I try to help as many as I can from paying for boarding school education for two girls in Uganda, donations to charities, fundraising through sponsored events, hurricane relief to Dominica, giving time to set up and promote various projects in Africa and PNG (this page https://www.indigosafaris.com/giving-back.html has more info) but this fella, Antonio, is a gem. Below you can find the story of how I met him in 2004, it’s a bit long in meme-obsessed 2017, but I’d appreciate it if you could take the time to read it. If you haven't got the time, just go here and make a donation.
---------------------
We had first bumped into Claire and Simon outside the Mozambican consulate in Swaziland when we were applying for our visas. They were on their second visit to Tofo having spent seven months there the previous year, and had come back to capitalise on the South African holidaymakers who buy a lot of the seashell jewellery that they made. Simon was a tall, slightly-built north Londoner with dreadlocks looking, if not quite like Jesus, then Brian of Monty Python fame. Claire also had dreads and with her pointy nose and new age clothes would pass for a modern-day sorceress. She was on the ninth year of an internal voyage of spiritual discovery, was a Reiki healer and had met Simon four years previously whilst travelling around southern Africa.
The beach at Tofo is host to a motley crew of vendors, mainly kids, touting fish, mats, paintings, baskets, bows and arrows, conch shells and the like. On our second day one little lad stood out from, if not above, the others. Antonio’s proud and upright bearing, his keen eye and charming wide-mouthed smile created an aura that was hard to miss. He’d be on the beach early, starting with a cup of coffee at the backpackers, and would wind up the afternoon taking on a tourist or two at pool despite being barely able to reach some of the shots without using an upturned beer crate. He looked about nine, albeit a very independent and self-sufficient nine. His brother Raphael, two years his elder, also made and sold a bit of jewellery and did odd jobs when he found them.
I found out they had been abandoned by their mother five or six years before and that Antonio was living with another family, whilst Raphael was roughing it. During their previous seven-month stay, Claire and Simon had taught them their trade in the afternoons when the boys had finished school and fed them when business was slow. Prior to that they had been making 30p a day selling baskets and chilli bites for someone else, now Antonio was making 10 times that, often more. The average unskilled Mozambican adult who has an employer and doesn’t rely on subsistence farming earns £30 a month. Both were bright kids and good English speakers by local standards, Antonio coming top of his class the previous year.
I couldn’t figure out how he was going to school and working on the beach all day, coming into the bar to buy a sandwich and a coke at lunchtime. One evening he saw me on the laptop typing away and seemed interested. I asked him if he wanted to see some photos of African animals and his eyes lit up when he saw a hippo. I sat him down and gave him the mouse, and showed him how to move on to the next photo, zoom in, zoom out, and go to another file. In no time, he was moving through our holiday snaps pretty much on his own. It transpired that neither of them had been allowed back to school since the new school year started in December because they needed some paperwork that only their mother, whose whereabouts were only known to be somewhere in the district of Zavala 150 to 200k to the south, could provide.
I put it to Simon that we take the boys and try and to find her. The next day was a Sunday, so I figured we might find her at church, if we could find her village, and I put my dog-collar shirt on to make our little posse look a bit less out of the ordinary.
I have been a reverend of the Universal Life Church of Modesto, California since my sister's first marriage in 1997. She emailed me some wedding pics from the big day in the North Carolina mountains where she was joined in matrimony to a Seminole Indian 28 years her elder known as Marion Skydancer by a woman in a shockingly bright red dress with a flame pattern cut into the hem and a matching bandana tied kamikaze style. When I enquired as to what type of crackpot preacher had conducted the ceremony she told me that the fiery kamikaze was a ULC minister, and that she was also ordained, having taken the title of goddess. That she wanted to marry this grey-haired old bloater who looked about 70 I could just about understand. That she had changed her name to the equivalent of "Swims like an otter" I could believe. But that you could get ordained on-line for free was beyond even my evening rum-tasting-enhanced gullibility. I checked it out on-line and approximately four minutes later my rum-tasting-enhanced curiosity meant that I too was an ordained minister of the ULC with the power to marry any couple of nutters that I could find willing to allow me to do so in 30-something US states. So before setting out on my round the world trip in May 2004, I had added a pair of dog-collar shirts to my wardrobe.
Given Simon’s messiah-like appearance (despite him pointing out that Africans might consider the Holy Saviour to be black), I thought teaming it with me in my dog collar could be of help. On the way down Antonio said he was 12 or 13, and whilst Raffy might pass for 15, just, Tohinio (little Tony) would be hard pushed to get any Dutch girl to believe that he was only one year away from being a legal shag.
We drove through the main town of Zavala area, Quissico, and Simon said that he thought that it was called Zavala. The boys shook their heads, and said to go further on. At the next village locals told us it was further south still. After 200k and nearly three hours driving on a road that had become considerably worse after five days of rain, compared to our drive up a week before, we were at the southernmost limit of the Zavala district. We didn’t have a lot to go on, and winning the lottery looked easier that finding a woman called Joanna who had happened to abandon her first two kids. A miracle would have been handy as the rain started to pour down. The crowds were asking the bemused Simon/Jesus to show them a sign. Simon/Jesus looked at his feet. I looked out the window to contemplate the impossibility of asking every person on the road for the next 50 or 60k if they knew a Joanna who’d told them she’d ditched a couple of her offspring. I saw a bus with Zavala written on it. A sign, a sign! All the true believers follow the bus!
After three stops in 10k, each one lasting several minutes whilst the ticket collector scrambled onto the roof in the lashing rain to unstrap bags piled up there, we asked the bus driver where Zavala was. 25k, Senor. Exactly 25k later was a village. Was this it, we enquired. Nine kilometres further on, Senor. Nine kilometres later we were back in Quissico. The church was closed, but at the end of the street was a police station and store, both proclaiming to be in Zavala town. Our luck was on the up.
The first bloke we asked knew someone who might know. We walked over to his hut. He didn’t know, but after much repeating of “Jo-hanna” (I blame Eddy Grant) and protracted sucking of air through the teeth, chin scratching and head shaking, he mentioned a man who worked out of the village who might know. We strolled down the road through the market and over to his hut. He knew two “Jo-hannas”, both outside the village. He and the boys threw a few names and dates around and he settled on the one who lived to the north. Unfortunately, he only had a vague idea where she might live. He called over his neighbour who had lived there longer, and Simon, Tohino, Raff, the three blokes and the neighbour walked back to the car back through the centre in loose procession formation, accompanied by a few stares and laughs from the locals. We thanked the first two blokes who stayed in town, whilst the last chap and his neighbour got in the truck and we headed north. After a couple of kilometres they directed us off the road and down a dirt track towards a lagoon. Five minutes later they pulled us over in front of a hut. The owner, a well-built, stern-looking fellow, had met Johanna once as she lived near his cousin. He changed out of his Sunday best and took us back to the main road, with the truck now seven up.
Three kilometres further north we turned back onto a rutted sand track that twisted through the palm trees until it started to peter out. I stopped at what would reasonably pass for the end of the line. Stern cousin-of-friend insisted it was still the road, just a bit overgrown. He got out, kicked a few of the piled-up cut-off palm tree branches and bushes, grunted “Sim sim”, and got back in.
“Is it far?” Raffy translated.
“30 minutes’ walk to my cousin’s”.
We ground over and through the undergrowth, not wanting to go off the “track” and into the adjoining crops, especially as the owner was tending to them with a rusty machete. After a couple of hundred metres the obstacles cleared and on we went to the cousin’s home. She piled in and the two boys made room by standing on the back bumper and holding on to the roof bar. 800 metres later we pulled up next to a field and a clearing where two young boys and a girl were running around. When we had debussed Mr Stern cracked a big grin and told the kids to say hello to their brothers and sister. We were there. Job half-done. Now, how would mum react to her abandoned kids turning up with four locals and a couple of ‘murungos’ (a pejorative term for a whitey) or ‘blancos’ - one a barefooted Saviour impersonator and the other a man of the cloth in fancy running shoes?
The newly found siblings ran off with Antonio, who was no longer little Tony, to find their mother. Raff sat under the mango trees with us as another couple of blokes pitched up. We suggested that Raff go on down the track.
“She’s got to come to me now”. Fair shout.
It was now gone three, and we had a good two-hour drive back through the potholes; I really didn’t want to drive at night again, but how could I rush this along. Eventually the kids returned with mum in tow, shaking her head laughing and beaming as she caught sight of us. A handshake to each of us was followed by an apology that she had nothing to offer. Raphael didn’t take the hand proffered but pointed at his progenitor’s bulging midriff with a stick and said she must be eating well. Another brother or sister she said. She was no slacker when it came to procreation as this would be the 5th since leaving the boys in Tofo, having lost one just after birth on top of the three we’d just met.
Sunset was now 90 minutes away, and Tonio decided to stay so he could get his certificate on Monday, rather than wait for his mum to get round to acquiring it and posting it so that he could go back to school straight away. Raff couldn’t start again until December, so he was in no rush. We left Tonio some money for the paperwork, the bus, and a present for his mother and we said our goodbyes. As he thanked us, all I could offer in return was a weak grin with eyes clenched and lump in my throat. He and Raff engaged in some affectionate brotherly arsing about on the back bumper as a beaming ex-Mr. Stern showed us a shorter way back. We dropped Stern and Tonio off, then all that was left was another eye-straining, ring-twitching 150k drive in the twilight.
---------------------
A week later I left Tofo, and continued my travels. This was all pre-Facebook. I thought about the boys, hoped they were doing OK, finished a round the world trip, got the wife pregnant, moved to South Africa, became a dad, got into UW photojournalism, got divorced, liven in Holland for a bit, and then flipped back into Nomad mode in late 2008. In May 2009 I was back in Tofo to write an article.
In the meantime, Tohinio had also been busy.
The people who were housing him, the owners of Dino’s Beach Bar, Dino and Nathalie, had unofficially adopted him, he’d become their 3rd son. He had excelled at school, graduating in general accounting and insurance management, he was on his way to becoming a martial arts instructor. In 2008, Dino passed away unexpectedly, and Nathalie found herself with kids aged 3 and 8 and bar with 30 employees open 20 hours a day, in shock and unable to cope. Up stepped Antonio, aged 17, and according to Nathalie, basically took over everything. Organised the kids, sorted out the bar, got things happening. And there he was in 2009, mixing drinks and music, ever more curious about what all the divers were interested in. Unsurprisingly he learnt to dive, and became a diver master (as did Raffy), and combined the bar work with diving, and generally being super-switched on an active, and started a family.
Until 2013, when the arthritis started, aged 22. Unable to dive, soon unable to work behind a bar, he had to move to Maputo to get a desk job for Movitel, the Moz cell phone network. Now he uses crutches to get about. He can’t carry anything. And, in short, he will be spending 2-3rd of his income on pain management meds until he wins the lottery to pay for surgery. Nathalie can’t help, as the cyclone that ravaged the coast in February this year did not spare the bar or her guesthouse. The guesthouse was destroyed, the bar repairs have taken the savings she had.
I probably haven’t done a great job of expressing why I think Tonio is more deserving than a whole bunch of other great causes out there. He’s not going to save the world from death by plastic, or fix the North Korean problem (but has a better chance than I do), but he always has had something. A spark, a magnetism. He is 100% trustworthy, dependable, amazingly self-reliant, quick to learn, to get things done. But all that promise is wrecked by his arthritis. People like Antonio are in short supply, especially in Mozambique. I truly believe that he will be able to do many more good things in the future, if he can get this op done.
Three weeks ago, in desperation, he launched a Go Fund Me appeal to raise the $5,500. So far he has $900 pledged. After a good start, donations have stalled. This is where you can help.
I can put in a quarter of what’s missing, $1100, I’m looking for kindly souls I know to put their hand in their pocket and help out, quickly, so less money is spent on monthly meds. I would also like to collect the money myself, and pay the bills directly as Go Fund Me take 8.5%.
If you want to make a small donation, best do it here https://www.gofundme.com/mq2sh-hip-...
If you can give $100 or more, best send it to me and I will get it to Tonio.
While he is convalescing, I am going to employ him to do some video editing and website work for me. I don’t know if he’s ever done any, but I bet he’ll pick it up in a day. That way he can still support his family whilst recovering and I’m sure I can find other work for him to do before he can get back in the water and do the job he loves.
If you can’t, or have other priority causes you believe are more beneficial, I totally understand; there are limits to what most of us can reasonably give. But if you could help out on this one, you would be giving a life back to a wonderful person, that will have knock-on effects down the line.