.jpg)
He is the inventor, designer and moving force behind our major International project, the wheelchairs, the schools and the orphanages our club has delivered into all continents bar Antarctica! It's now some 24 years ago since Des visited Fiji, where he witnessed crippled and disabled children literally dragging themselves through the dirt, and decided that something needed to be done about it. Two years later, the project was brought to the attention of Ray Martin, at the time the host of 'A Current Affair', who promptly agreed to send a reporter and film crew, and accompany us to deliver the first 10 wheelchairs to Fiji (see my report on our website, under the Wheelchairs Tab).The original wheelchairs not only recycled part of the frame, but also the wheels. As their tyres would go flat, this turned out to be not the optimal way, so new wheels and BMX style tyres with solid inner tubes have been deployed since. Since then, almost 9,000 wheelchairs have been manufactured from old bicycles, plywood and other components, at a cost of just $100.00 each. The most recent batch of 280, loaded into a 40 foot container, is destined for Bangladesh..gif)
For many people, an achievement of this magnitude would do nicely, thank you. Not Des: visiting Vanuatu, he saw a family living under a bit of corrugated sheeting. "Something needed to be done about that" - the typical decision. Des designed a low cost house, which not only was easily built, flat packed for shipment in a container, but was also designed to be cyclone proof (and verified to be, by our Charter President and Civil Engineer Bill Moir). From this design emanated a design for a school to accommodate children who were orphaned in the Tsunami that devastated Indonesia and Thailand on Boxing Day of 2004. Just a few years later, in 2007, a tsunami hit Samoa. Our club, using a similar design, manufactured, supplied and installed a Primary School in the Matafaa Village on the south coast of Samoa. This was followed by a massive project, in concert with the Samoa Victims Support Group, to supply and erect an orphanage in Apia, followed by delivering a second classroom in 2016.
So where to from here? No rest for the wicked, as they say: President Elect Mario Fairlie has had discussions with other Rotary Clubs in the Surfers Paradise cluster to supply a Radiology Unit to a hospital in Vanuatu. "They have the hospital, but no X-Ray Unit" Des explained. "No flies on him", as the common Australian colloquialism says: Des' design is ready. It is similar to the last Samoa school, based on a 40 foot container, which ultimately becomes a major structural component of the building, with 50 mm Refrigeration Panels, wooden frames, cyclone proof...