Jungle Wheelchair Training

30 March 2017

This was our week for the wheelchair evaluator/repair course in Iquitos (ee-KEY-toes). What a hot and steamy jungle this place is! Only part of our shipment of repair parts and tools arrived in time for the class (flood disasters throughout Peru pre-empted part of the shipment), but we successfully finished the course and trained 13 evaluators and technicians who will support our wheelchair donations arriving in the jungle in the next few months. We are donating 1,100 wheelchairs throughout Peru this year.

Our efforts with wheelchairs (and all of our humanitarian projects) help all needy people, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Students practiced proper patient evaluation before fitting recipients into wheelchairs. Evaluations are critical for proper fitting of recipients who will spend 16 hours per day in their wheelchair.

The technician/maintenance training was the most action-packed portion of the class. We all got our hands dirty and fixed a bunch of broken chairs.

Hands-on repair class.

Too much fun to be called work.

Sandy helped out along with the guys.

Class members showing off their newly repaired chairs.

This woman suffered from polio at age 5. Her current chair, after 10 years in the jungle, was completely rusted and unusable before the repairs. With new wheels and hardware, this chair was restored to like-new condition, and she could actually get herself home on her own power.

Of the 13 students in our course, 7 were wheelchair-bound because of polio. They had contracted the disease during a period when all of us in the USA had easy access to the polio vaccine. Polio has now been eliminated throughout most of the world, but the effects of the disease live on.

We took graduation photos at the end of the course.  

Graduating class of evaluators / technicians. The four in the front were from the National Rehabilitation Institute in Lima. This course was their chance to completely teach the training course and develop this program so it continues long after we are gone.

Our desire now is that these people can run this project in Iquitos by themselves. We now move on to Cusco, high in the Andes Mountains, to present this course again.