Finding purpose in wheelchairs
Belize and Bar Harbor
When I was a fourth-grader, I desperately searched for Big Foot behind our house. I’d hide in the closet at night, become obsessed with Doctor Who and absolutely believed that trees had souls.
All my childhood, I hunted through the New Hampshire woods behind my backyard on Route 101, a two-lane highway in Bedford, searching for something bigger than I was—maybe Big Foot, maybe a time lord like Doctor Who, maybe just purpose.
I never found it. Not then. And as I grew older, I gave up on finding it over and over again. Until I tried again.
And those moments of searching, like all moments pass and go, but certain universals? They hopefully stay.
One of those universals is love. Another is kindness. And I’m constantly reminded by this in times of hate. And it almost always happens when I meet people when I travel. It happened especially when I document a wheelchair project sponsored by Rotary International clubs in the United States and Belize.
The Rotary Club of Corozal is in charge of the distribution of wheelchairs in its area. Members of the Bar Harbor/MDI Rotary Club and the Rotary Club of Ellsworth, Maine raised money to fund the wheelchairs through the Canadian Wheelchair Association and travel to Belize to help fit, size, and distribute the chairs.
And my job with these Rotarians isn’t to find Bigfoot or purpose, but to document the Rotarians’ work. Rotary International is a nonprofit organization that brings 1.4 million local community leaders together to create positive lasting change both in their local communities and the world. Its motto is “service above self.” It’s best known for its quest to eradicate polio, but its service projects are about fighting disease, promoting peace, saving children and mothers, clean water, helping local economies, saving the environment and sometimes things that are a bit more personal and local like building a playground or fitting someone to a decent wheelchair.
“Tell me why you do this,” I ask Dave Wells, a bespeckled sixty-year-old cancer survivor, Rotary Club president from Ellsworth, Maine and former pilot as we board a plane for Belize from Logan Airport in Boston.
Dave is already wearing a pastel-green t-shirt he bought for each of the twenty or so Rotarians on the trip.
“I do it because it gives me a purpose,” he says, moving forward a couple feet in the line to board the plane. “I mean how lucky am I to even have that?” He turns to fully face me, sweat peeking out around his hairline and he smiles, jolly, loud voiced. “You’ll see. In a couple hours, we’ll land. It’ll be hot. It’ll be amazing, and you’ll see.”
MAYRA AND HER PRINCIPAL IN BELIZE
One of the first people we meet in Belize is Mayra who nobody can exactly explain why she needs a wheelchair. The healthcare system in Belize is a mix of private and public hospitals and providers, but according to one Belizean Rotarian has had some corruption, which is why Rotarians distribute the wheelchairs and not the hospitals. In the 1980s, the healthcare system began a "Quest of Equity," a national healthcare plan, but there are still gaps and almost 50 % of children in Belize live in multidimensional poverty.
That doesn't stop Mayra's school principal from doing his best for all the kids in the school. The children flock to him when he enters their yellow-walled classroom. Mayra stays where she is and looks up.
Though the youthful, dark-haired, Carlos Itzab, the principal of the Chen Chow School in Belize is proud of Mayra, a young girl with watchful eyes, slightly stringy dark hair that falls into her face despite the orange and yellow beads that pull pieces of it to the side off her forehead as she sits in a dilapidated wheelchair by her desk. He wipes his brow with a handkerchief that he quickly puts back into his dark dress pants. He reminds me of David Wells somehow because he’s so excited to share with me.
“You’ll see why I’m proud of her,” he says with a wink.
It isn’t because Mayra smiles a lot or that she’s well behaved but shy.
It’s because she’s smart, very smart. In a small, open-air classroom on the ground level of the pastel-green concrete school building, Carlos opens Mayra’s spelling notebook and proudly displays her writing to the twenty or so American Rotarians from various Rotary International clubs in Maine who are assembled around her, putting together her new wheelchair while her classmates watch.
“Her writing is perfect,” he says, standing straighter, smiling.
Shelly Falk, incoming president of the Rotary Club of Corozal agrees. “It is perfect.”
“She is very good. Her grammar is so good,” Carlos’s voice becomes a whisper, “so much better than the others.”
The other students in Mayra’s standard one (equivalent to U.S. grade three) don’t mind that Mayra is so smart. They seem proud of her, too, bustling around her, letting her give them answers to questions, and telling everyone they can how smart she is. Because she has issues with both her arms and legs, they volunteer to sharpen her pencils for her, to help her in a multitude of ways, every single day, their teacher explains.
Mayra helps them too. She helps them write better, helps them make their sentences make sense on the page.
“The children take care of each other,” Carlos says, rubbing a hand across the white linen of his dress shirt. “It warms your heart, you know?”
Shelly’s Rotary International club in Belize has also helped the school with its feeding program and other providing picnic tables. But this March day, it is all about Mayra who is getting her new wheelchair. It is about Mayra who is too shy to look up much of the time until after I show her the picture I took of her with my camera. Then she is all smiles as she gazes on herself.
“I look fantastic,” she says.
“Even more fantastic in your new wheelchair?” I say.
“It’s fancy,” she announces. Some of her classmates giggle.
And her smile expands, transforming her serious face into something shiny, something that glows.
Sometimes when you are very smart, it’s hard to smile. Sometimes when you are very young, it’s hard to trust. And sometimes the best smiles are the ones that aren’t easy, but the ones that are earned.
Mayra’s smiles are like that.
Smiles are only moments, aren’t they? But they are moments of connection where friendships and understanding are made. Sometimes those connections fade like all memories and moments. But sometimes they last and when they do?
LIANDRO’S HUGS
“He likes to hug,” Terri Olivia tells us about her son, Liandro, the next day, as they both stand in the crowded living area of their home in a village vaguely close to Mayra’s school and Coruzol. “He likes to hug a lot.”
Terri is not lying.
Come within a foot of Liandro, a thin-calved tall boy with thick, brown hair and the kindest eyes, and you will be hugged. Your elbow will possibly be kissed. If you are wearing sunglasses, they will fall off your head as he smooshes you into his bright blue Polo shirt and wraps his arms around you.
“He is full of love,” Terri says to the Rotarians from Maine clubs as they bring Liandro a wheelchair and try to fit it to him despite his constant hugs. “His heart is so full of it.”
Liandro is on the autism spectrum, Terri explains, and Belize is an autism-friendly country, and Liandro is a friendly boy, too. According to the Autism Belize website, " Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability that can cause significant social, communication and behavoral challenges. " It impacts 1 in 58 families worldwide and though Belize is autism-friendly, there is still work to to educating others and making sure people in rural areas get services. Or sometimes just getting functioning wheelchairs when they have physical problems as well.
“Maybe we should do this outside,” suggests Deb Hammond, a Rotary member’s wife and a physical therapist after she bumps her hip into the corner of a TV stand, and Liandro stops hugging. There's not quite enough room to manuver in the house.
Terri’s brown eyes lose a bit of their happiness. “OK. Let’s try.”
LIANDRO’S SCARS
His heart is full of love, but his forehead is full of scars. Every time Liandro’s parents try to take him from their small wood-sided home, he collapses, leaning forward, hitting the hard surface head first. It happens in the house, too, sometimes. But mostly it happens outside by the brightly blooming pink flowers that scale up the patchwork side of the house when he crosses the threshold of his home into the world. The boy whose heart is full of love panics when he steps outside, and if his parents (who both work at a nearby radio station; his father is there now) do not catch him, his forehead gets another scar.
“His head falls first. Always first,” Terri says, sighing. “There is a commotion and then he falls.” She turns to me right before we both take Liandro across the threshold, grabbing his hugging arms, supporting him. “Bless you for doing this for us.”
And I know right then that I don’t deserve her thanks or her son’s hugs because I am obviously not doing enough. I’m just a fundraiser and a documenter. I’m just telling their story. How can that possibly be worthy of a blessing from a woman who raises a son who is full of such joy?
WE ALL HAVE SCARS
For a second, I think of my own body and all its scars that have happened from falling – falls I don’t remember because they happen when I had seizures in college after the Epstein-Barr virus that causes mono travelled to my brain. Scars that appear in random places. For a second, I think of how scared I am sometimes when I step out into the world, worrying about seizure scars and scars that can come from people unlike Liandro, from people who don’t think kindness and love are priorities.
“I am very happy,” Terri says as Liandro is fitted into a wheelchair and backed over their lawn He doesn’t fall during the entire process. He doesn’t get another scar. There is no commotion.
Liandro seems happy too. Within minutes he is already hugging from his wheelchair. Nothing can stop a young man who is full of love, not scars, not thresholds, and nothing can stop him especially when he has a wheelchair.
Terri looks at me when the other Rotarians are all busy milling about on the beautiful green grass of her front lawn talking to a reporter from the radio station. “You? You have scars too, photographer girl?”
Before I can answers, she nods, answering herself, I guess and she says, “Liandro gets his love of hugging from me.”
Two seconds I’m engulfed in Terri’s arms, the joy and kindness of her transferring into me, my camera smashed between us, and I think that maybe hugs are a big enough purpose for me.
IRENE IS A SINGER
Later that day the Rotarians and I travel in two crowded, sweat-smelling white vans to meet Irene, a singer, in her much bigger home. She’ll be 93 that October. She radiates happiness and energy and brilliance. She is a woman who takes it all in and loves everyone with the kind of love that knows you are flawed, but doesn’t care because we are all flawed.
“People ask me what my secret is.” She laughs as I squat next to her as she sits in her plaid and floral nightgown in a wood dining room chair. The Rotarians who are bringing her a new wheelchair are filtering out of her house that smells of flowers and cinnamon and spice. She pats my arm with the palm of her dry hand and says, “I say I have no secret. I just am me.”
She is so much her. Her salt and pepper hair is perfectly groomed and frames her only slightly weathered skin. Her ages lines are laugh lines, crinkling by her eyes and the corner of her mouth. Singing, she says, has kept her looking young, kept her voice a bird song in the wind. She tells me she lives her life happy.
She sings soprano in the church choir. She has sung for God for years, decades.
“Is that your secret?” I ask.
She just laughs again.
“I still go to church,” she says. “I still go to the community center.”
“Is that your purpose?”
“Yes,” she says, “but you don’t go looking for your purpose. Your purpose goes looking for you.”
Outside flowers surround her home. Birds of paradise and bougainvillea flourish, blooming everywhere, reaching out of the lush green leaves and up to towards the sky.
Before the wheelchair, she had been using a cane that her neighbor gave her. The cane is solid, black, nice, but not enough to keep her steady all the time. Her house is neat and clean. Her caregiver sits at a table watching as Deb and Scott Hammond fit Irene to a wheelchair.
Irene is an easy fit, gracious and kind. It’s hard not to stay inside her house and hang out forever, to maybe beg her to sing hymns, to share her secret that is no secret: she has purpose. Her purpose found her.
THE ANGRY MAN
I once had an angry local man ask me why the Bar Harbor, Maine Rotary club goes to other countries when we should be doing work here, in our own county. He was the kind of man who believes in taking care of needs at home first, I guess? Which I get.
But the thing is they do.
Local Rotary clubs in Maine help local organizations in Maine all the time. The Bar Harbor club alone raises thousands of dollars that it gives to local nonprofits every year. But the beauty of Rotary is that it’s more than that. It’s about building international friendships, too. It’s about Rotarians from Belize also coming to Maine or Canada and helping us with projects like the North American Rotarians have helped them. It’s about making connections and building stronger friendships, not just with the woman next door who needs her driveway shoveled out, but with people like Irene and Terri, Mayra, her principal, Liandro.
Sitting in a posh lobby of a hotel in Bar Harbor, surrounded by Rotarians in suits and business wear and tourists in fleece, I told this to the angry man as his round, potato-shaped face turned read. I said, “You can help people at home and people far away. They aren’t mutually exclusive.”
He sipped his scotch. I could smell the malted barley, fermented into liquid and now vapor on his breath as he said, “No you can’t.”
And I said, “You know that playground? By the Mount Desert Island YMCA? Rotarians helped build that. You know our hospital? Every year, Rotarians raise thousands to help local cancer patients who go there.”
He sputtered and turned away, heading for the appetizer table, done with me.
There will always be people who are threatened by love and friendship. Don’t let them make you doubt yourself: I think that’s what Irene would say.
Or maybe she’d say, “Stay shiny even as they try to dull you down.”
Or maybe she’d just say, “Your purpose finds you.”