Farmer Agnes Ochai received the first ever Women in Focus Community Champion Award
By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
ABUJA, April 24 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When Nigerian farmer Agnes Ochai's first pregnancy exacerbated a rare skin disease, she suffered from rashes, itching and strange patterns forming across her body. Then her husband left her.
Pregnant and abandoned, Ochai travelled hundreds of miles across Nigeria to seek medical treatment in her home state for her 'leopard skin' - a symptom of onchocerciasis, a condition which can affect the skin and the eyes, leading to blindness.
After safely giving birth, Ochai felt inspired to help distribute free medication to other people with her disease.
More than 25 years after she started giving out the drugs, 53-year-old Ochai last week received the first ever Women in Focus Community Champion Award, celebrating the role women play in the global fight against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).
"After I started taking the medication, people saw me and were shocked by how much my skin had improved," Ochai said.
"They asked me how it happened and I told them about the medicine I had taken," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation from Geneva, where governments and private donors pledged more than $800 million to accelerate progress in wiping out NTDs.
Some 1.5 billion people, mainly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, are infected with one of 18 neglected tropical diseases - debilitating and sometimes fatal illnesses, the WHO says. One billion of them are receiving treatment, half of them children.
Onchocerciasis is spread to humans by the bite of an infected black fly common in river areas, and affects the skin or eyes. The eye disease is also known as river blindness.
While not working on her farm, Ochai travels from village to village, house to house, in her state of Enugu in southeast Nigeria, giving out free drugs donated by foreign aid agencies to people in remote areas.
Unable to read or write, Ochai is accompanied by her son, who keeps records and ensures people receive the correct doses.
Her drive is fuelled by the fact that those with onchocercal skin disease require treatment throughout their lives as long as they are in areas where the black fly-borne parasite is present.
"People from my village gathered in my house when they heard that I had been nominated for an award and would be travelling abroad," said the mother of eight, whose husband returned to her and fathered six more children before his death in 2009.
"I wish I could return with more medicine for them. That is what I want," added Ochai, who said she goes by the nickname 'Madam CDD (community drug distributor)' wherever she travels.
(Reporting By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, Editing by Kieran Guilbert and Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)
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