Inside Remzija Arapovic’s small disheveled home, the walls are more gray than white, and six of the kids run around barefoot on the creaky wooden floor. Though the living conditions are marginal at best, Remzija’s son Jasmin walks over to a flowerpot made out of Coke’s bottle, touches an inch tall plant that his brother had planted, and says, “It will grow.”

Growth comes in many forms. Almost all of Remzija’s children suffer from one medical condition or another, but three are afflicted with a rare disease called rickets. Mostly afflicting children, rickets softens the bones when there is a deficiency of vitamin D, phosphorus, or calcium.

For the Arapovic children, physical growth and health has been greatly stunted, but for a family living in poverty, the fighting chance to grow intellectually, professionally, and personally cannot come without first meeting the basic needs of physical health.

For many years of her children’s upbringing, Remzija had to choose whether she should buy bread or medicine for her kids. Their house was once renovated, but it’s now full of mildew. She’s been raising the seven kids, ages 4 to 17, under the most difficult conditions where, she says, it is hard to keep them healthy.

“Their hands and legs were completely crooked,” she explains.

In 2009, Remzija received help through the SOS Children’s Village in Goražde where a donation from the Sanela Diana Jenkins Foundation for Bosnia and Herzegovina was invested into the Al-Hana pharmacy. This, in turn, provided the necessary medicine to assist in the normal development of three of Remzija’s children.

Even with that help, Remzija explains that times have always been tough with such a big family. “Sometimes if I received help, I didn’t know how to divide it seven ways.”

Though the social welfare system is familiar with Remzija’s situation, she has never received any funding or help of any kind other than that from the Sanela Diana Jenkins Foundation.

“We usually pick the families to offer help if we know their hardships,” says Adisa Adzem, a social worker at SOS Children’s Village.

Now with this assistance, and several years after the donations, the signs of under or misdeveloped hands and legs are less and less visible. Though still in need of other assistance, Remzija feels fortunate and is grateful for receiving the medicines she needed to help cure her three children with rickets.

“Now that they’ve grown, you can hardly tell they ever have rickets,” Remzija says.

Article and photos by photojournalist Dijana Muminović