He may not have hands but he holds a dream.
The 25-year-old Antonie “Tonton” Eduard Bendanillo, who lost his arms at 12 after he was electrocuted while trying to reach a live wire with a steel bar, wants to be a lawyer someday.
The fourth year political science student of the University of San Jose-Recoletos said he heard doctors discuss about amputating his arms in the emergency room after the incident. From then on his life changed forever.
“At first I could not accept that they would remove my arm because I was used to having arms. But they made me understand that if they would not remove it, the infection would spread to the rest of my body and that I would die,” Bendanillo said in Cebuano.
Days after his right arm was amputated, doctors had to cut his left arm below the elbow as well.
“When I woke up, both my arms were gone. I cried,” he said.
Feeling useless, Bedanillo refused to learn basic tasks without his arms in the first few months after the amputation.
One day, a friend from their church visited him at the hospital and suggested that he learn to write using his mouth with the help of what was left of his left arm, but he was hesitant.
But his friend did not stop convincing him, so he tried to give it a shot. “I was like a child who was starting all over. I was only making scribbles,” Bendanillo said.
After a month, Bendanillo said he mastered writing using his mouth and relearned other tasks to be functionally independent.
At 18 years old, Bendanillo returned to school and realized that public acceptance was even harder than performing tasks with no arms.
“It’s really difficult because I have to adapt to people. It is difficult because people are different, you do not know what they are thinking,” he said.
Bendanillo, who still has to be assisted in some tasks while in high school, said he only ignored those who tried to put him down and concentrated on his studies.
In sophomore college, he left Leyte all by himself and enrolled in Cebu. He lives independently for four years now.
“I realized that I can stand on my own even without an assistant and I also wanted to challenge myself,” he said.
Bendanillo, who commutes around the city alone and manages to hang out with friends in public places, said he’s dating a special someone for the past two months.
When he finally becomes a lawyer, he said he wants to help the plight of people with special needs like him.
John Michael Aroa, Bendanillo’s classmate, said that from the first time he met him at their school’s library, he was immediately inspired by his motivation to learn.
“He deepened my purpose in life. He made me realize that despite the many problems I have, there are people who have heavier burdens to carry. I learned from him that as a student, we should always think positive. He motivated me,” Aroa said.
When asked for an advice for handicapped individuals like him, Bendanillo said, “Don’t lose hope. Believe in yourself. We are not hopeless after all. Habang may buhay, may pag-asa (As long as there is life, there is hope).”