At 10 years old, Michael Panther could no longer run. “I remember getting tired very easily,” he says quietly. “My back hurts. My legs felt weak. Slowly, I could not move the way I used to.”
He was growing up in South Sudan at a time when war had hollowed out health systems and torn families apart. What began as fatigue and back pain slowly became something far more serious. “It did not happen in one day,” he says. “It was gradual. I just kept losing strength.”