Last week's speaker 01 April 2015: Des La Rance
Posted by Franz Huber
on Apr 04, 2015
Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.
John 3:17-18
One does not necessarily need to be religious to recognize the above bible quote exactly meets Des La Rance's concept. In the mid Nineties, Des visited Fiji as a tourist. He is not the type who simply wants to sip cocktails and fry himself on the beach, so he went a bit away from the beaten track. And what he came across triggered a sequence of events that, ultimately, led to over 6,750 crippled children in all continents receiving the gift of mobility in the form of a wheelchair. "There must be something I can do about this" was Des' single determination. Out of this, the concept design of building a wheelchair from discarded bicycles emerged.The early days were difficult to say the least. Together with some of his fellow Surfers Sunrise Club members, Des toured the other Rotary Clubs to present his idea of making a low-cost wheelchair. For a paltry $100 (they still cost less than $100 today - all labour is voluntary), he could help a disabled child in a developing country to come away from dragging themselves along the floor and become mobile. Ok, so a couple of hundred dollars were raised here, and another hundred there...At the District Convention 1997 at the Royal Pines Resort, Ray Martin, the host of Channel 9's 'A Current Affair', was the keynote speaker (about the Fred Hollows Foundation). Later that night, Ian Mayberry raked up the courage to invite Ray to come along to our wheelchair display at the conference. In a short time, one saw Ray wheeling himself in one of our wheelchairs up and down the corridors of Royal Pines... This resulted in A Current Affair featuring the delivery of the first 10 wheelchairs to Fiji (see report in the Download section, bottom right hand side of our website), which in turn raised funds very much in the $6 digits. As the saying goes, the rest is history.
Since then, Surfers Sunrise Wheelchair Trust, under the chairmanship of Daryl Sanderson, and key members Des La Rance, Bob Harrison, the late Keith Lutz and dozens of volunteer helpers, has supplied wheelchairs to some 31 countries, even to Russia (Chernobyl) where they experienced the ire of the Russian Mafia who didn't want to let the wheelchairs to come in free of charge. They bought an old Ambulance (it looked just like that one in *M*A*S*H*), and on back ways, the chairs were smuggled from Finland into Russia...
As time went on, the Wheelchair Trust branched out into providing buildings, starting off with East Timor during their struggle for Independence. An orphanage desperately needed help - their building had been destroyed by the Indonesian Army. In concert with the Army (including General Peter Cosgrove) and the Rotary Club of Doncaster (our regular visitor and Honorary Queenslander Graeme Trainor comes from there), materials were organized and, via the Australian Army, shipped from Darwin.
Then, on Boxing Day 2004, the devastating tsunami hit the West of Indonesia and the coast of Thailand. Our club organized for a primary school and play gym to be erected in Phuket. Another massive tsunami hit Samoa in September 2009. Again, the Surfers Sunrise Wheelchair Trust organized for a primary school and play gym to be built at Mataa'fa village on the south side of Samoa. This led to a major project, the 'House of Hope' in he capital of Samoa, Apia. Some 32 abandoned, abused or orphaned children are now accommodated there. And one of our members, Mario Fairlie who is an electronics communications expert, also financed a video link to Apia's court house, so children did not need to appear in person and thus did not feel intimidated. Each one of these stories deserves a major write up on its own. On our website http://www.rotarysurferssunrise.org, on the right hand side towards the bottom of the Download section, there are some write-ups relating to the projects in Thailand and Samoa.
What's next? A hospital in Papua New Guinea - using the 8 containers in which it is shipped as major structural components of the building. It only gets better...