On a regular school night in Pennsylvania, United States (US), Elizabeth Akua-Nyarko Patterson set out to attend a friend’s birthday party with six other students.
Chauffeured by their high school teacher, she bantered and laughed with them unaware her life as she knew it was about to change forever.
The van met with an accident, flipping over several times. By the time it landed on its head, everybody except Patterson had been hurled out on to the street. They were luckier.
Patterson was trapped under the weight of the van, waist down.
Only 18 years old at the time, she suffered severe brain injury and for the best part of the ensuing year, had her “skull removed and placed in a fridge due to the consistent swelling” in her brain. She underwent seven head surgeries, suffered a stroke and walks with a limp. Yet, despite three years of relentless hospital visits, unfathomable trauma and the most trying circumstances, Patterson managed to pass high school, and successfully.
What motivated her to complete it, when most people would have given up any shred of hope?
“Because that is the reason we left Ghana for the US,” says Patterson.
Born in Kumasi, the cultural epicenter of Ghana, Patterson’s upper middle class parents, both of whom were bankers, did everything possible to provide the best for her and her sister.
In 1995, when her mother won the US visa lottery, a big deal in Ghana, they left everything they had worked for behind in their country in search of a better education for their daughters.
When Patterson was 10, her parents enrolled her in private school in the US, whilst the family of four shared a room in the basement of a friend’s home.
From being an outstanding student taking up to six classes, after the unfortunate mishap, Patterson had to now cope with special tutors and deploy a tape recorder for her studies. She had to request extended time to complete her exams, in seclusion, away from her classmates.
“My confidence was affected along with my sense of self and I kept asking myself ‘do I belong here’? But whenever I get those doubts, the grades come, I get an A and it validates everything and I say ‘ok let’s keep going’,” recalls Patterson.
She eventually overcame these challenges – she didn’t allow herself to have a choice – and enrolled for college in New York where she finished in three years – as opposed to the standard four years – a Bachelor of Arts in political science and business management.
After working for a short period as a teacher, both in Ghana and New York, Patterson could not cope with the physical demands of the job on account of her condition, so had to stall that career. She returned to what she loved most – studying further, obtaining a master’s degree in public administration.
As a child, she had wanted to be like her idol Barbara Walters, the American broadcast journalist, author and TV personality. However, a thesis she did on education reform policies in Ghana, during her first degree, led her down a different path.
It was only natural she felt deep empathy for children who couldn’t cope in school.
“There was a student who was struggling in school when I was teaching in Ghana, but her parents thought she was possessed by the devil and proceeded to take her to church to cast out the devil in her,” says Patterson.
She decided to take control of the situation and gave the student one-on-one tutoring for a month. The young girl’s grades improved dramatically. Patterson also attended a conference on girls’ education in South Africa (SA) as part of her research. While in SA, she realized girls with learning disabilities were discriminated against and not getting access to the best education in the country.
Patterson’s epiphany led to the Girls Education Initiative Of Ghana (GEIG) that she founded in Ghana with a mission to provide academic support for girls with special needs so they accessed higher education and benefitted from better professional opportunities. In just over a year and a half since inception, her organization supported 13 girls in the greater Accra and Ashanti regions by providing 90-100% academic scholarships with support all year round.
After overcoming the initial challenge of bureaucracy to set up GEIG, fundraising is a hurdle the organization is still battling with. Most of its start-up capital was raised predominantly through Patterson’s personal savings and support from friends and family abroad.
She is determined to keep pushing for the cause no matter the roadblocks.
At Ghana’s prestigious Vlisco Women’s Month Awards, which celebrate exceptional women in Africa, Patterson was crowned winner last year (below). She strongly believes Africa needs to develop its youth.
“I believe that right now, about 40 per cent of the African population is the youth between 18 and 35. We are vibrant, we are entrepreneurial and I believe we need to harness that to help the youth of Africa and Ghana advance.”
The youth in her country only need turn to Patterson for advice – and inspiration.

Robert-Bernstein

From Trauma To Triumph

It was in December last year, at 3:30AM. Helga Barkhuizen was in the passenger seat with a friend and his two children. They were on their way from Cape Town to Beafort West, on the N1 near the small town of Leeu-Gamka, 70 kilometers away.
The Miss South Africa International 2012 had had the time of her life at a biker rally and a new tattoo to boot. It still itched on her wrist.
The road to George was a familiar one for Barkhuizen. The road of the N1 lances through kilometer after kilometer of dry scrub.
Barkhuizen drifted off to sleep on the center console.
When she woke again, she saw the truck turning into a petrol station that was to crush her life.
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“The car pulled to the right, I closed my eyes and I prayed, and I said you know what, this is it. I am ready to die,” she says.
In a few seconds, in a horror collision, a steel rod sticking out the back of the truck split the car in two slicing her left leg and shattering her right.
“My leg was on the floor in front of me. It was taken off in the accident. It wasn’t like I woke up in hospital, I said goodbye to my leg there and then,” says Barkhuizen.
But, by pure chance, an ambulance was at the petrol station.
“The first thing I told the paramedic was that he needed to give the driver something for shock. He was running around like a headless chicken. I get calm in emergency scenarios so I don’t actually freak out. And the paramedic was looking at me and saying ‘you do realize how hurt you are?’ I said yes I can see, but [the driver] needs to make phone calls right now, if he cannot verbally get my personal details across, then I am going to die,” she says.
It was also lucky for Barkhuizen that she remained conscious.
“I asked for the Jaws of Life and they said there was no chance. We can’t bring the jaws because you’ll be dead before we can get them here. The fact that I was kind of flexible and had been a dancer all my life saved my life. They bent me like a sandwich to pull me out of the car. Then they vacuum-packed my body into a black bag to keep the blood circulation going. I was literally sitting in a pool of my own blood before the 70 kilometer drive to the hospital,” she says.
Barkhuizen spent two months in a Cape Town hospital learning to live with her amputation. She was overwhelmed with the support her family gave her, who flew in regularly to visit. The others in the car accident walked away with scrapes and bruises.
“I didn’t know [the driver] had fallen asleep until about a month ago [July], when I went to see the car. Call it women’s intuition, like an ant itching in your bum, I felt like something was amiss. The panel beater said there was no chance that he had been driving 100 kilometers an hour and didn’t see the lights on the truck. The car was going at 160km/h when it hit the truck. It was when the driver touched the brake that I woke up and knew something was wrong.”
These days, Barkhuizen is full of life. She walks proudly around in her prosthetic, which costs R500,000 ($46,000), and is built to support high heels. She needs to buy two pairs of shoes though, one for her real foot and the other, a size larger, for the fake one.
The fake foot also needs to be charged, like a battery.
From her offices in Rivonia, Johannesburg, she runs an interior decorating company; a motivational speaking clinic for teens; an eco-tourism property development scheme and an executive lounge networking club. She has also designed a glow-in-the-dark rubber band engraved with your personal details – inspired from her accident. All this is done in a male-dominated business world.
“It’s difficult. You will see a pretty face and a skirt and they will think wow that is how she got there and you wouldn’t think she worked her bum off to get to that point. It’s very difficult to walk into meetings with cultural generalizations or with a specific certificate to get things done,” she says.
Barkhuizen is training to participate in the South African Paralympic swimming squad, plans to buy an automatic motorbike with a foot strap and dreams of scuba diving with an aquatic-friendly leg.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-29596 alignleft" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Oct-Nov-044-046-Helga-Barkhuizen-004-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Oct-Nov-044-046-Helga-Barkhuizen-004-225x300.jpg 225w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Oct-Nov-044-046-Helga-Barkhuizen-004-300x400.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FWA-2014-Oct-Nov-044-046-Helga-Barkhuizen-004.jpg 435w" sizes="(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" />
“Whatever came out of this, I knew I had to make the most of it, why stop living because I’ve lost one limb. There are so many things that are driving me, particularly my personal trainer and my businesses. I am young, I still want to get married, there is no reason for my life to be boring. It feels like I’ve been actually asleep for the past ten years. I’ve missed who I was,” she says.
You’ve got to listen to somebody who cheated death and prospered.

Tag: Accident

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

From Trauma To Triumph

Losing A Limb, Finding A New Life