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Surprise! You're assembling 25 wheelchairs!

Friday opened up like any normal morning here. The bird. Breakfast & tea. Walking the road to Joytown school (aka: the Road of a Thousand Eternal Staring Eyes). Sometimes I think just maybe we'll have walked that road enough where people will get used to us "white folks" and stop staring at us. This dream has yet to be fulfilled… I won't hold my breath...

The day at Joytown opened, as usual, with singing and prayer and greetings (yay handshaking) with all the Bethany'sKids therapy staff. Everyone split up to their respective tasks and we were busy setting up the day's research when Karen skipped into our work-space hall with a smile and a surprise. 25 wheelchairs (in boxes) had just arrived by truck to Joytown school and we were just the people to assemble them. The exciting thing about these chairs is that they came as direct of last year's Wheels research report that the Free Wheelchair Mission (FWM) wheelchairs, used by many of the kids at Joytown schools, had fallen apart. Rather than send new parts, FWM sent entirely new wheelchairs. For free. These everything-in-the-box, Ikea-style wheelchairs were pretty easy to learn to assemble and by the end of the day we had 15 chairs ready to go. I had to choke down my frustration several times throughout the assembly as we opened tattered wheelchair shipping boxes to find entire (crucial) parts missing or broken. So fun. The basic idea of FWM is to be "affordable" and easy to repair with local parts, which results in chairs that look like this…

It's so redneck I'm gonna die!
But aesthetically pleasing or not, this works better than the ground.
As you can imagine, not the best from a clinical or long-lasting perspective. But, kudos for FWM manufactures for listening and sending replacement chairs. Well… sending MOST of a replacement chair. That’s at least some step in the right direction.

The rest of the day's highlights include:
  • Spending time laughing and playing with some of the out-of-class Joytown primary students (pretty much my favorite)
  • Collecting survey data over at Joytown high school (which is my other favorite). High school students here are serious. Here in Kenya, you take a big test to get in and pay mega school fees so there's not much room for messing around. Still, the "secondary" students are really relate-able and intelligent and like to joke around with us.
  • To-go Kenyan dinners of fried chicken and potatoes (Danielle's favorite)
  • Driving through the "is-this-road-two-lanes-or-three" or "woah-that-was-close" Kenyan traffic
  • Shopping at "Tusky's" aka the Kenyan WalMart (and accidentally walking through the Men's security line because I'm an oblivious American)
  • Waking up to the familiar head-scrambling bumpy road into Kijabe town. Looking out the front window of the van, you see a cottage-cheese-like patchwork of concrete. And this is THE ONLY road ambulances and any sick/injured person must come down to get to the hospital. Huh. #KenyansAreProbablyTougherThanYou
  • Arriving at the home of Dr. Letchford, a Kijabe doctor who is letting us stay at his house while he and his family are away in the states. Home is complete with working dog! Her name is Emma. :)
  • Falling asleep to absolute silence (as we are miles away from any busy road or the SACDEP frogs)

Let the construction begin.

The chairs we actually assembled (FWM gen 2)

Danielle and the Joytown pri life

Well hello there

Kenya traffic and people - Notice the use of the sidewalk/road (they're interchangeable here)



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