Her Own Two Feet

 


Title: Her Own Two Feet
Genre: Non-fiction
Author: Meredith Davis
Major Awards: Children's Book of the Year- Nonfiction 
Grade Level: 4-7
Age: 8-12



Summary: Her Own Two Feet is a narrative nonfiction middle grade co-authored by Meredith Davis and Rebeka Uwitonze. It is based on the true story of Rebeka, a Rwandan girl who came to America at the age of nine to have corrective surgery for her club feet. The book begins with her growing up with seven siblings, her mother and father in a small home made from the red dirt of Rwanda. She eventually learns to walk on her twisted feet, but it is painful and slow and as she grew older and heavier, she knew she would go back to crawling. So, when offered the chance to see doctors in Texas, she takes it. Her stay turns into a year of castings, surgeries and physical therapy, before returning to Rwanda.

This project began in 2012 not with words on the page, but living the story. When nine-year-old Rebeka arrived in Texas she did not speak English, she had never lived with electricity or running water, and she had only attended school for a few months. While living with our family, she learned how to speak and even read English, won countless games of Uno and Memory, wore thirty-one casts, visited Dell Children’s Hospital fifty-eight times, and learned how to walk again on the bottoms of her turned-straight feet.







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