RUNWAY SUCCESS
Fashion took centre stage last weekend to raise funds for the Cyprus Turkish Orthopaedice Disabled People’s Association — but behind the scenes were organisers who had worked for weeks to put the show on. UĞUR KARAGÖZLÜ talks to one of their leading light
ALL the glitter of the catwalk was in the air when hundreds gathered at Alsancak’s Merit Crystal Cove Hotel for a fashion show in aid of the disabled.
A VIP audience, all dressed in black and white, included MPs, leading businesmen and women and Merit International Hotels chairman Hanzade Özbaş.
But among the brightest stars there was Ruhsar Vudalı, the prime mover behind the occasion, despite struggling with her own illness for over quarter of a century.
Now 50, she was diagnosed with a rare muscular dystrophy at the age of 27. Since then, the progressive condition has forced her to leave her banking job four years ago, give up her prized designer high heels and to walk with a stick — sometimes resorting to a wheelchair.
But her own difficulties have not daunted her in her desire to help others, which culminated last Saturday in the fashion show and auction which raised more than 180,000TL for the Cyprus Turkish Orthopaedic Disabled People’s Association.
It was Ms Vudalı’s mother who first noticed something odd in her daughter’s gait as she watched her walk to the terminal at Ercan airport after having sat an exam in Ankara. She was in her early 20s and studying economics at university there.
As it became increasingly clear that there was a problem, the family began consulting one doctor after another, shuttling her between specialists from 1991 to 1993 without getting to the bottom of the problem.
“It felt as if I had a cut on my leg which was stretching and I wanted to relax it,” she recalls now.
In 1995 her parents took her to see renowned Turkish medical professor Necmettin Pamir, who hospitalised her for a fortnight for tests. But
still the correct diagnosis evaded them.
Then she bumped into genetics professor Tayfun Özçelik at a reception, and when she explained her symptoms he suggested she could be suffering from a muscle disease.
In those days there were three major centres for research into muscle conditions, in Holland, Germany and Australia. The family chose to take her to Holland, where her uncle lived, but the diagnosis took a long time,
and the process was very costly.
“In the end we were given a medical report. I read it and have no recollection now of what was said in that report. The only thing I remember seeing was that there is no cure,” she recalls of finally having her illness pinpointed.
Further consultations in London brought the explanation that hers was a genetic disease, and the chances of having it were a “lottery”. She had had the misfortune of “winning”.
She accepted her fate; facing up to one of a range of conditions which are characterised by gradual weakening and breakdown of the musher cles. Her mother could not, and quarter of a century later still cannot watch a film which features someone in a wheelchair. Her former busier nessman father was more realistic but still found it hard to accept. The issue became a taboo between them.
Ms Vudalı says it was her sister, Hatice, four years
younger than her, who became and still is her biggest source of support. The pair live together in Bellapais.
“My sister is my biggest single fortune in this life,” says Ms Vudalı, telling with an expression of mingled gratitude and love of how, for her sister, “my life comes first and then hers”.
The disease progressed rapidly, before slowing when she was 44, and as it advanced she began to have falls. They became — and still are — her greatest fear.
She broke her leg for the first time of many in 2004, and realised she had reached a crossroads.
“Until then my life had not really been affected. But when I experienced the first major fall and broken leg . . . I realised that things had become more difficult and came to face to face with the fact that they were going to become more so.”
One impact of that realisation was having to abandon her 55-strong collection of shoes.
“I was never a vain person but I had always had a passion for designer shoes,” she says now, adding that saying goodbye to the footwear was one of the most difficult stages of her arduous physical journey.
Still, she says: “I never asked, ‘why me?’.” She reasoned with herself that “even the mighty Ottoman Empire imploded, so of course it can happen to me”.
Despite her stoicism and a busy social life, she admits now that it was only during the last four or five years that she has “accepted the facts and gained inner peace”.
“Before that, I just pretended I had.”
With this acceptance came growing involvement in charity work.
“I was always involved in charity work and I always wanted to do something to help the orthopaedically handicapped . . . But as my ability to move became more restricted, I suspended those efforts.”
Mustafa Çelik, the late chairman of the Orthopaedic Disabled People’s Association, had a “huge impact” on her, and it was a wave of regret following his sudden death in 2011, at the age of just 47, that propelled her back to charity work.
“When he died I wished I had been more active,” she says now.
Since then, she has set aside her own disability to
support the association — two months of hard work, helped by chairman Günay Kibrit and fellow members İlgen Bağcıer and Çağda Pehlivan, culminating in last weekend’s fashion show.
“Yes I am handicapped but probably I am the one who is in the best state at the association,” she explains.
“I have always lived by comparing things in this life and the association gave me the chance to look at others and realise just how fortunate I am.”