Thursday, December 24, 2015. The “serpent child”, is a teenager from the town of Tangerang, Indonesia; he has a strange disease that produces scales on his skin, they fall down and regenerating itself. This condition gave him the nickname and isolated from the rest of the children of his community.
Ari Wibowo since his born has a disease of the skin called Erythroderma; generating inflammation in the epidermis. The case is one of the oddities of medicine which doctors of his town cannot neither know how to cure, so that he does not receive any treatment. This condition is also known as “Red man syndrome”, which is an exfoliative dermatitis; producing the formation of scales on the skin in the 90% of the body.
The young man has to keep his body wet in every moment to prevent that his skin get dry, dehydrates and falls; episode that will happens anyway once every 41 days. Until that time, he applies creams and water in his skin every three hours.
The condition of Ari, in addition to the problems of skin; does not allow him to speak normally and even, he cannot blink due to the dry skin of the eyelids, causing an ocular dryness that has already committed the vision of the right eye and puts in danger the left, which he must kept moist all the time. The appearance of the adolescent gave him an unfriendly nickname, he lives isolated and almost has no friends because people look him with horror or ignore him.
Anhari Lubis, a photographer from Jakarta of 35 years old; spent four days with Ari and his family in the village, portraying the young who in other occasions they had already described as “the zebra child”. He met images that are part of a personal project to disseminate how live some communities of Indonesia. He describes that the young man has the skin as if he had suffered severe burns, from the soles of his feet to the head; and if it does not kept well moisturized, it hardens and prevents him to move freely.
In his village it is hard for him relate with his peers, those who dislike his appearance; some teachers do not accept him in school for fear of being infected, both they and the rest of the students.
In Indonesia there is the superstition that if a woman mistreats an animal while she’s pregnant, this takes revenge with the unborn child. And in the village it is said that the mother of Ari hurts a lizard while awaiting the birth of her son, which would explain why he was born with this disease.
Ari has to keep his eyes well moistened to protect them from a potential blindness. This skin disease is rare, appears at birth and continues throughout life. It is hereditary and is transmitted when both parents are carriers of a gene with anomalies.
ALFA