TO GET around, she has to use her arms to drag her body along.

And it's not because she doesn't have legs.

She tried walking, but as her legs were too weak to carry her 170kg weight, they wobbled and gave way.

It has been over two years since Mrs Nurhaniza Ahmad has tried walking out of her house in Penang.

The 35-year-old told The Star: "I used to weigh 110kg five years ago. But after I took some Indonesian jamu tablets (traditional medication) to relieve pain in my knees, I suddenly started to put on weight.

"I took the pills for only two weeks. When I stopped, the aches returned and my left leg started to swell below the knee," she said after getting a visit from the Penang Umno public complaints and welfare secretariat (Sepakat) and the Armed Forces Medical Corps.

She also suffers from high blood pressure.

Her husband, Mr Abu Bakar Hashim, 50, who lost a leg in a motorcycle accident when he was 16, earns about RM700 ($288) a month as an odd-job worker.

Her major support is her 11-year-old daughter, Nurbayti Md Dali, who quit school to care for her mother full-time.

Every morning, the devoted daughter would wash the family's clothes, cook the meals, fetch water from the well outside their home and bathe her mother.

Peeking through the windows of her dilapidated house, a helpless Mrs Nurhaniza often gets teary-eyed when she sees people walking by outside.

The two welfare teams have already pledged support for cases like hers.

Other cases

Besides Mrs Nurhaniza, they visited grandmother Besah Taib, 70, and her son, Yaacob Shariff, 46.

Both are unable to walk due to nerve problems.

The team from Sepakat also visited 58-year-old Zainol Awang whose leg was deformed and swollen following a road accident a year ago.

In Kampung Tok Kangar, Juru, they paid leukaemia sufferer Jasni Ishak, 35, a visit.

"We will help all the families we visited to apply for aid from the state centre," said Sepakat chief operating officer Azlina Mehtab Mohd Ishaq.

She said Sepakat would also ask the Armed Forces Corps to provide manpower to help repair the dilapidated houses of a few poor families in the state, with funds from the federal government. The Armed Forces medical services assistant director-general Kol Dr Zubir Ahmad provided free medical check-ups for the families they visited.

This article was first published in The New Paper.