“Now my daughter will finally get a chance.” – Recipient Story from Zambia

Thanks so much to our founder and president, Don Schoendorfer, for bringing back this inspirational story from his recent travels to Zambia!

Last month, I traveled to Zambia with World Vision and three doctoral candidates enrolled in Azusa Pacific University’s physical therapy program. We delivered the first 500 of the 6,000 wheelchairs we plan to distribute over the next year in collaboration with World Vision, and developed additional video materials and training manuals for the GEN_2.  While there, we met a very special little girl:

Beauty is her name.  She is five years old.  She lives with her grandmother in the tiny village of Mwachiele.   In addition to malnutrition and possibly other developmental disabilities, Beauty suffers from club feet.  She walks on the sides of her ankles, and with each step, flashes of pain shoot across her face.  Her grandmother has carried her everywhere, taking her to a World Vision clinic about twice a month.  The possibility of getting Beauty to school each day has been out of the question.

Beauty weighs 25 pounds, which is small for most wheelchairs; however, with some simple modifications, she was very comfortable in her new GEN_2.  Her mother told us that she was intensely shy and having a dozen strangers visiting did not help.  We wanted to take Beauty’s photograph in her brand new wheelchair, but the best images we could get were of her big brown eyes.  She looked somber, but her mother recognized gladly that a world of opportunities was opening up for her daughter in the gift of a wheelchair.

“Beauty has had little ability to be part of the community or participate in any events,” she said.  “Now my daughter will finally get a chance.”