Free Wheelchair Mission
- 31 May 06, 2:34 PM
Don Schoendorfer, a mechanical engineer, watched a disabled Moroccan woman crawl across a dirt road 27 years ago. In 1999, having been haunted by the memory, he decided to do something about it and the was born.
As the site says: "The first step was to develop the least expensive wheelchair satisfying the greatest range of needs, and the second step was to dispense the wheelchairs
at no cost to the physically disabled poor in developing countries on a non-discriminatory basis."
Using simple low cost parts, Dan can currently deliver wheelchairs at around 24 pounds per unit. His vision is to deliver 20 million wheelchairs by the year 2010.
There is a huge amount of information on the site: the best place to start is probably the
. Also of interest are the -
over 130,000 wheelchairs have been delivered to 57 countries to date and the archives of what they call , are a great insight into what they achieve week by week. Last week it says they shipped one container to Bangladesh and four to India.
In an on ABC7 LA news, Schoendorfer said: "People who get these wheel chairs, they crawl or they're carried, typically their radius of life would be 10-15 feet, as far as someone can carry them"
He heard from one man in China who'd been confined to bed for 25 years and longed for something most take for granted. He told Don: "I can hear them out in the dining room and I've always wanted to go eat with them, I didn't want to be ungrateful because they take care of me ... for the first time I was able to have dinner with my family."
Comments
If he can do this, why can't the NHS do it?
Also see
for others doing this...
This is a gret idea, that needs to be more widely publicized. Organizations such as hospitals and medical practices that provide supports and services to people with disabilities need to each contribute the cost of one chair!