Life without limbs won’t stop Joanne’s Far East trip

A courageous teen who was born without limbs says her physical limitations will not prevent her from making an epic trip to the Far East this year.

Joanne O’Riordan, 16, who is recovering from a spinal operation, said she is determined to travel to the Philippines in the coming months to give hope to another child who was born without arms and legs.

The Cork transition-year student’s filmmaker brother Steven, who will record Joanne’s trip as part of a documentary he is making, admitted he had been worried about the logistics of travelling to a remote part of the country which will involve hours of overland travel.

But he confirmed the trip would be going ahead and that travel arrangements would be made once he had secured funding for his fledgling documentary, No Limbs, No Limits.

“It’s going to happen in either October or November. We’re just waiting for funding to come through and once that happens we’ll go ahead and organise it,” Steven said.

“It’ll be a tough trip because it’s in a remote, rural part of the country and obviously it’ll be far harder than the one we did to New York earlier this year, when Joanne addressed the UN. But she is determined to do it and is mad to go, so we will do it.”

Joanne, from Millstreet, one of only seven people in the world with total amelia syndrome, hopes her visit and optimistic nature will inspire a 12-year-old fellow sufferer, Jesus, who has endured a difficult childhood in which he was shunned by fellow villagers.

When he was born, the local people in the isolated community thought there was a curse in his family and refused to accept him. He was then locked away for the first five years of his life until his father brought nuns from the Sisters of Mercy, who have a base in Cork, to him and subsequently cared for him and educated him.

Steven said the trip to the Philippines would form a major part of the documentary on his sister’s life, which will begin filming next month and run to Christmas, charting the daily challenges facing the bubbly teen.

He said RTÉ and Channel 5 have already expressed interest in the project, in which the British station’s bosses would also like to feature the challenges facing Tina Stark, 28, another total amelia sufferer from the UK.

But he said he has greater ambitions for the film and hopes to see it in cinemas and reaching a global audience when it gets released next year.