By Diana Brement,
JTNews Columnist
Last issue we had MOTs who are granddaughter and grandfather. This issue we feature a mother and son.
Bernice Kegel sent me a link to a very moving film about the Prosthetics Outreach Foundation and one of their missions to Vietnam.
A physical therapist, Bernice is a long-time board member of POF, which provides surgery and prosthetics for children and adults in developing countries with limb loss and deformities.
She came to the states from South Africa in the 1970s. After a brief stint in Chicago, Bernice moved to Seattle where she found work with the Prosthetics Research Study run by Dr. Ernest Burgess, founder of POF.
For six years, Bernice has run the foundation auction, and last September she joined the Vietnam mission.
“It was my first time doing an outreach trip,” she says. “It certainly helped me with my motivation to do the auction one more time.” (It raised more than $300,000 this year.)
Other volunteers included two local orthopedic surgeons (Rob Veith and Mark Dales), and, “I took my son, fourth year orthopedic resident Gary,” along with a videographer and photographer.
The group worked in the remote Son La province.
“Potential patients were notified we were coming,” Bernice explained, including many who had been seen previously and promised surgery. POF screened 65 patients, and chose 50 who were “surgically manageable by our group,” she says. “There were many disappointed people.”
Bernice also visited prosthetic patients in their homes, as well as “some of the clubfoot kids, making sure they were wearing their shoes, doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
Club feet are a huge problem in developing countries due to lack of early diagnosis and treatment.
Bernice is married to Wally and they also have a daughter, Ilana and another son, Terry, who you’ll read about below. The family are longtime members of Seattle’s Congregation Beth Shalom.
There’s more about POF at
www.pofsea.org, and do watch the film at www.youtube.com. Type “Prosthetics Outreach Foundation” into the search box.
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Terry Kegel also has a film in his life, but this is a film he made.
I Speak Soccer is about the culture of pick-up soccer, practiced in most of the rest of the world outside the United States. It has been slated for three screenings at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival (STIFF), and opened the festival on June 5.
“It seems like it’s been in the making my whole life,” Terry says, calling soccer and traveling “my two passions.”
His first pick-up soccer experience came when he was studying in France as a college sophomore. Out for a run one day he happened upon a park where “a group of about 20 guys [were] playing pick-up soccer,” he says.
Coming from the States where playing “pick-up” soccer involves a lot of organizing, calling your friends, finding a field, “I was amazed. I wasn’t used to that.”
Terry grew up playing soccer (both his parents have played and coached), so “I was excited to see something familiar.” He joined in easily, and went back almost every day he remained in France.
“It became probably the most important part of my experiences,” he says, and helped him to develop friendships, better understand local culture, and learn the power of pick-up soccer in getting to know a new environment.
After graduating from Haverford College outside Philadelphia in 2003, Terry applied for a Watson Fellowship, which generously funds independent study projects outside the U.S. Although he didn’t get the fellowship, the very detailed application forced him to think hard about the film and what he wanted to create.
“I was applying for more practical jobs at the same time,” he says. “I realized that [the film] was such a real desire of mine, so much more real than the other…jobs I was applying for.”
That year he took a job teaching overseas and he continued to live overseas for the next four years, playing soccer and working on the film.
Moving back to Seattle in 2007 he started editing the film, finishing in January of this year, just in time to enter the film in STIFF.
Currently getting his teaching degree and certification from the University of Washington, Terry hopes to help students make movies.
“I have a lot of ideas about how teachers can use film in the classroom,” he says, calling it “a powerful thing” for a teacher to watch a kid tell a story. He’s student teaching at Bailey Gatzert Elementary in Seattle and plans to teach kindergarten or first grade.
Terry says that having parents from another country gave him an international perspective from an early age.
“I was always back and forth, here and South Africa, visiting family, growing up around accents…I was very fortunate to have the means and the push from my parents to get us interested in different places and people.”
The film airs again locally July 14 in Tukwila, at the All Nations Cup, a local soccer, culture and arts festival that celebrates the international communities of the Seattle area, and we just received word that the film has been admitted to the All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival. Additional screenings will be posted at www.ispeaksoccer.com.