Wheelchair project

(I'm going to keep this up at the top of my blog for a few days.)

My baby sister, Eva (not really a baby anymore—she’s 17!  Yikes!), is working on her Gold Award, the highest achievement in Girl Scouting, equivalent to the Boy Scout’s Eagle Award.  For her project, she is raising money to buy wheelchairs for disabled people in developing countries.  When she told me she was doing this, I almost choked up, I was so touched.  

$59.20 pays for the cost of one wheelchair (I feel almost criminal thinking of how many wheelchairs my TiLite could have paid for).  100% of the money goes to the organization distributing the wheelchairs (Free Wheelchair Mission).  My sister has a goal of being able to pay for 50 wheelchairs.  This is one of the best of causes, and one that I feel passionately about.  I ask anyone reading this to donate, even just a little.

I remember very well the first time I used a wheelchair.  It was during my worst flare-up back in November of ’07.  Every day, it seemed, I would wake up and another part of my body would have stopped working.  By the end of the month, just before my hospitalization and stint in rehab, I couldn’t walk at all.  I couldn't even move my toes.  A friend brought over a wheelchair her elderly mother was no longer using, and the relief I felt at being able to move again was really indescribable.  It’s hard to explain how it feels to lose mobility.  The distance from the couch to the kitchen, a matter of 20 feet or so, stretches into what may as well be miles.  It is terrible to be helpless and totally dependent upon others for what most people take for granted—two moving, functional legs.  

Without the ability to move, it’s easy to start feeling like a wallflower in the dance of life.  Everyone else is out there moving and dancing, while I’m sitting here, left out, left behind.  Every person needs to feel useful and productive in order to find satisfaction and joy in life—it’s innate to being human.  But without mobility, it is hard to feel useful for much of anything.

I wouldn’t be able to do any of the things that bring me joy and a feeling of worth on a daily basis without my wheelchair.  It is my lifeline to feeling like I belong to the human race.

Knowing how difficult I would find my life without my wheelchair, it is nearly impossible to imagine the despair and difficulty of people living in impoverished areas of the world where one’s very survival is much more dependent upon physical abilities than it is in my privileged upper-middle-class American life.  If you belong to a family in which every person is needed to work just to put food on the table, loss of mobility is not only personally devastating, but may actually put your entire family in jeopardy.  

Providing a means of mobility for these people means everything.  It means unlocking the jail cell that their lives have become.  It means being able to feel like there is some purpose to your life, some reason to keep on trying.  Mobility allows mothers to be able to do all the work of motherhood again, fathers to be able to help provide for their family, children to be able to go to school, to be able to see some hope for their future.  It means being able to re-enter the human race.