From walking tall on stilts at Dubai's Global Village to learning to walk again

Tonight, Global Village will open its doors for the 27th season. The annual festival has become an important event in the UAE’s social calendar, owing largely to performances it hosts every year. From costumed characters to the stage design, the sheer quality of entertainment on offer is truly world class. Tonight would have been fifth year in a row that Mererid Rees would have participated in Global Village’s opening night had her life not changed forever on the evening of November 16, 2021.

The British performer was a notable figure in Global Village. If Mererid wasn’t performing as one of the costumed characters that we have come to associate with Global Village, she would be posing for photos on top of stilts, zooming around the park as a tourist on a segway or playing a sleepy character going for a walk on top of a giant teddy bear.

“I loved the variety that my job offered,” Mererid tells Khaleej Times, adding that the entertainment management loved her versatility as much as the crowds did. No wonder then she was appointed team leader in her third season. However, four weeks into her fourth season, her stint came to a premature end.

As she was getting ready backstage for her show on the kids’ theatre, Mererid collapsed and was urgently rushed to hospital. “The last thing I now remember is having breakfast with a friend earlier that day. And then waking up in Dubai’s Rashid Hospital, surrounded by family members who had dropped everything to be by my side,” she recalls. Mererid had suffered a brain arteriovenous malformation (AVM) that has left the right side of her body completely immobile. Had it not been for the quick response of Global Village’s medical team as well as the efforts of brain surgeons in Dubai, she would have suffered greater damage.

Brain AVM is described as a condition when “a tangle of blood vessels in the brain bypasses normal brain tissue and directly diverts blood from the arteries to the veins”. While AVMs are mostly found in brain and spinal cord, they can be present anywhere in the body. Like Mererid, some people show no symptoms until they experience bleeding like she did, which ultimately resulted in a stroke.

“My family had no idea that I had an AVM as I was never scanned for it,” says Mererid. Had it been diagnosed earlier, she would have been advised against any rigorous physical activity or anything that could increase the levels of blood pressure.

Far from giving up on life, Mererid now concentrates on small victories. These could range from walking half mile between her flat and her sister’s house to walking a mile to the closest shop. Alongwith her daily tasks, walking unaided brings with it a new set of challenges and an anxiety that Mererid hadn’t experienced before. Walking these distances, combined with intense physical therapy she has to undergo routinely, helps Mererid’s recovery, but does come at a significant cost.

She says that the estimated cost of her treatment is approximately 20,000 pounds (Dh83,000 approximately). To help raise this amount, her family members, friends and other volunteers have created a group and aim to collectively walk the distance from Wales to Dubai and back. At the time of reporting on this story, the group has already covered 4,064 miles and hope to complete 10,000 miles by November 16, to mark completion of a year since Mererid’s AVM landed her in a hospital.

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