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Wheelchair Program in its Second Year

Pamela Logan, Sept 7, 2001

Dear Friends of the Kham Aid Foundation,

I'm writing to tell you what we're doing this year with our wheelchair program. It's a bigger, better program this year, and it will make a big difference in the lives of hundreds of disabled people in Sichuan.

This year we have TWO container-loads of hardware. The first is 240 wheelchairs donated and shipped by the Wheelchair Foundation in Danville, California. This container has been held up in shipment because Beijing, for some reason, has been very slow to approve its importation. Our partner, Ms. Zhu Rongli of the Sichuan Federation of Disabled Persons, has been really worried about these chairs. However today the approval finally came from Beijing, so we can get the container out of Hong Kong harbor and out to Chengdu.

The second container comes from Wheels for Humanity, of North Hollywood, California. It contains both wheelchairs and physical therapy equipment. The stated value, for customs purposes, is about US$52,000. All of the items have been collected by WFH. Some are brand new but had been wrongly prescribed, and could not be reused due to a U.S. law prohibiting recycled medical equipment from being given to patients.

The WFH container did arrive in Chengdu and that's what the team is working with now. That container has 90 wheelchairs, 28 pieces of physical therapy equipment, 55 walkers and 10 pairs of crutches. All of these items, and the 240 chairs yet to arrive, are being shared out by Kham Aid Foundation (for the people of Kham), the Holy Love School for Disabled Children, and the Sichuan Federation of Disabled Persons, which is sending its pieces to counties around the province. The shipment also includes more than two hundred toys that will be distributed to extremely poor children living in Tibetan and Yi areas by the Holy Love Foundation.

Our 2001 team is bigger and better than last year's, too. We have five professional therapists Eunice Shen, David Altman, DeeDee Freney, Sally Lovell, and Ilse Verweirder, two translators Betsy Weidenmayer and Anthony Kuhn. In addition, Dana Isherwood and Judy McCalla are representing KAF and WFH respectively. With five therapists, we can give each patient much more care and attention.

Virtually all of our requests from Kham are for adult chairs, so we took all the adult chairs in the WFH shipment, about 25 of them, to Yajiang and Litang with the team. In Yajiang the team seated six people during the last two days. Several of these were quite complicated cases, so it was good we had the deluxe WFH chairs for those patients. (The other chairs are simple hospital chairs with sling seats and no adjustments). It was also good we have five professionals on the team to work with the patients and their families. We are doing a much more thorough job this year than we did last year, when we had only one professional.

I was with the team in Yajiang, and watched them seat four people. We had one case of severe cerebral palsy in a 36 year old man. He had the use only of his right hand, and could barely talk. His family had made a low cart for him, which they used to bring him outside. His torso and legs were quite deformed by living on this trolley and being unable to move himself around or change position. His muscles were contracted and his limbs could not be straightened. That was our first case and it was a very difficult one.

Down the road from him, we met Tupten, a 25-year old paraplegic accident victim who fell out of a third story window. He had had several surgeries but they were unable to restore spinal cord function. He had severe sores on his buttocks from sitting all the time, and having no sensation. His upper body was quite strong and he will be able to get around pretty well with a wheelchair. His mother was very emotional during our visit. She started crying, which made him cry as well. Sometimes giving a wheelchair to these families releases a lot of pent-up anguish over the unfairness of being disabled and having no hope for recovery.

In Yajiang town we had an 18 year old who suffered from a blood disease that has inflamed all his joints and made movement very painful. We had a 26 year old who is severely retarded from birth and has deformed feet. His father is a Party official but still the family had no recourse to get a wheelchair or care for their son. They were accustomed to have him crawl around the house, because he could not walk. Of course he could not go outside. His father brought him to us, carrying him piggyback. When we seated him in a chair, he did not immediately understand how to make the wheels turn. But when he figured it out, he began tearing around the room like mad, bumping into chairs, grinning crazily. Luckily someone was standing in the doorway, so he couldn't shoot out and fall down the steps!

All the recipients were all completely overjoyed to receive chairs, not to mention caring professional attention from our team of volunteer therapists and seating specialists. The mother of the boy with blood disease had tears in her eyes as she went around and thanked each of our team members. There were two other recipients that I didn't meet. One was a severely disabled young man who is prone to seizures and could not be brought to the site where we were working. We sent a small team to his home, so as to minimize the disturbance.

Now the team is in Litang and they are scheduled to seat eleven people over the next two days. They arrived last night and are a little slow in getting started today due to the physical effects of Litang's high elevation 4019 meters (13,260 feet).

We have invited health officials from six counties to join the team in Litang and receive training in how to measure people for wheelchairs, and how to seat. So a good deal of the team's time is taken up by training. They have prepared some simple educational materials explaining the most important aspects of the process. The point of this is so that, when we send the Wheelchair Foundation chairs to them later, they will be able to deal with them properly, and they will be able to make their requests more detailed, so we won't be sending the wrong sizes to them. Some of the officials who have come have shown a lot of interest and aptitude. Others are just along for the ride, but that's par for the course out here.

In Chengdu, the SIchuan Federation of Disabled Persons sent representatives to pick up the PT equipment. The representatives were briefed by our team members on how to use the equipment they were receiving.

At the Holy Love school they were able to put one item to use immediately. There was a little boy suffering from some kind of spastic problem that makes him very uncoordinated and unbalanced. He made immediate use of a device that I will call a standing wheelchair since I don't know its proper name. He fit into it perfectly, and by pushing the big wheels he will develop some motor skills in his upper body that he currently lacks.

According to the schedule we have laid out, the team will return to Chengdu on Sept 12. There they will continue working with Holy Love, and the Federation. They are planning some visits to patients' homes to work with the families on improving the home environment in a way to facilitate stimulation and independence for the disabled family member.

So that's the news from Kham!

Pamela Logan