Bulletin for Mar 19, 2015

Wheelchairs for El Salvador and beyond.

 

There were two high points in today’s meeting: The ceremonial handing over of $80,000 to Joseph Brant Hospital Foundation and a presentation on Wheelchairs in El Salvador by Rotarian Peter French.  We managed our way through the usual formalities of course despite a couple of duty roster no-shows; but you know how it goes, we manage.

 

 

It seems to have been a bit of an uphill battle (in my view) but today we paid out the first and second installments of our commitment of $240,000 towards the expansion of the Joseph Brant Hospital.  There has been a palpable resistance to advancing money because of the perception that the money would merely fund JBMH’s new parking structure.  A few have been less than convinced that the hospital expansion was really going to happen and that it was really more about building parking capacity.  Personally I was convinced that the expansion plans were real, but then I had a ring-side seat for a few years. It is also clear to me, mundane as it may seem, that having parking capacity in place before you open a new facility is common sense.  Anyway, we handed over $80,000 to JBMH Foundation’s Amber Mathews today and she was graciously pleased to receive it.

 

Peter French’s presentation on Wheelchairs in El Salvador was one of those events that you really had to be there for.  If it sounds vaguely familiar, you may recall that club members Nancy Penny, Bob Simpson and your scribe reported on their May 2013 trip to El Salvador wherein they participated in the distribution of 560 new chairs to various of El Salvador’s disabled; young and old.

 

 

For me, at the time, it made perfect sense: the Rotary Club of Burlington had financed a couple of container loads of new Chinese-built wheelchairs and together with the Rotarians of San Salvador (the country is EL Salvador, the capital SAN Salvador) we assembled and distributed them.  In reality, they didn’t need us there; the local Rotarians were more than capable of handling the assembly and distribution and besides we don’t speak the language.  But it was nice to see it all come to fruition.

 

While I was contentedly looking on, Rotarian Peter French’s mind was working overtime.  He’s a retired engineer with an extraordinary talent for making the most complex things from scratch.  Peter looked at those standard, conventional, albeit no-frills, wheelchairs and thought there has to be a better way.  He saw a product that lacked innovation and was begging for simplification.  When you think about it, other than comfort and motorization, what’s new in a wheelchair?

 

 

Peter saw a challenge to come up with a better, simpler, more elegant design.  He cited some examples of elegant simplification: Ikea furniture is elegantly simple, so is Nike’s swoosh symbol; the Cadillac symbol is not.  Back home, he acquired a standard wheelchair and took it apart.  It is, he said, overbuilt, over complicated and in total, comprises more than 130 parts. There has to be a better way.   

To cut to the chase, Peter has designed a simpler wheelchair and he showed us a prototype.  In our appearances-matter world it would probably not attract many admiring glances, it is not a fashion item, not elegant in that sense of the word.  But where it is elegant is in its relative simplicity and utility, in the way it can be built locally with relatively little in the way of production machinery and thereby provide local employment and economic growth opportunities.

 

I started out by saying that you really had to be there this morning.  The crowd around Peter at the end of the meeting was witness to the yes-we-can excitement provoked by his presentation.

 

Coming up in April (date to be decided) is a four-club workshop where you and I can take part in a hands-on assembly, just to see how simple the Peter French Chair is. And later this year, probably October, Peter will lead a Rotary team to El Salvador to train, discuss and establish a wheelchair centre.

 

An interesting footnote was Peter’s observation that if you were to take his wheelchair to the folks at CSA, UL, ISO or any of those stamp-of-approval outfits, it might just end up as another over-engineered, over-built and over-complicated wheelchair.  Just do it.

 

P. Scribe.

 

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