Sunday event raising money for Kinston business providing prosthetics to Africa

What looks like a regular shipping container will be transformed into a prosthetics lab and patient care facility in just a few months.

A company in Kinston is working to send the container to the Ivory Coast in Africa to help patients there get prosthetic limbs that they otherwise wouldn't have access to.

It would help patients like 16-year-old Fidele, who was an orphan that lost his leg due to an infection.

It was last year that Paul Sugg, the owner of EastPoint Prosthetics & Orthotics, helped build and fit Fidele with an artificial leg that has given the teen new hope and a new mission.

EastPoint and Fidele, along with another non-profit organization, are teaming up to help others in West Africa who need prosthetic limbs.

Sugg has done two mission trips to the Ivory Coast and has helped build more than two dozen prosthetic limbs.

Working out of a small classroom slowed them down, so they want to create a more permanent lab that can help fill the serious need.

"There is a tremendous need if you think about diabetes and you think about vascular problems, those are the number one cause anywhere in the world for lower extremity amputation, and especially there, there are more trauma-related incidents that happen, so the need is great and then it becomes even greater because they can't afford it," Sugg explains.

In the U.S., artificial limbs can rage between $3,000-$12,000 or more, but with the help of a 3D printer and the use of different materials, Sugg and his team are able to drop the cost to $500-$1,000 in West Africa.

Those costs are covered through donations, which they are also working to collect for the construction to turn the containers into a prosthetics lab and patient facility.

EastPoint has a goal of $100,000 so they can finish transforming the containers. They want to have them shipped to the Ivory Coast in December.

They created a non-profit organization called EastPoint Legacy to help raise the funding for this project.

On Sunday starting at 2 p.m., Simply Natural Creamery will be donating a portion of their proceeds to the EastPoint Legacy Foundation.