The following is the written record of the wheelchair project documented in pictures a few posts back. PLEASE go back and look at the pictures once again!
Wheel chair Projects Kinshasa 2014
The wheelchair
initiative is one of the five major initiatives of the Church’s Humanitarian
Services department. Its purpose is to
provide wheelchairs to people with disabilities in developing countries
according to World Health Organization guidelines through local partner
organizations that directly serve people with mobility disabilities. Humanitarian Services specialists are called
to work in specific areas of the world and to develop and implement projects in
which an agreed upon number of people will be assessed, fitted, trained and
then receive an appropriate wheelchair free of charge. Typically a project includes a training
program in which local clinicians are taught how to assess, fit and train
wheelchair recipients and local technicians are taught how to assemble and
modify wheelchairs according to the clinicians’ specifications. All aspects of the projects are carefully
evaluated to assess the impact of the project in the lives of individual
wheelchair users, product quality and services provided.
The
wheelchair specialists in the SE Africa Area are John and Marcia Dow of San
Diego, CA. When they learned that were
called to the DR-Congo (DRC) as humanitarian missionaries they contacted us and
arranged a meeting at a restaurant near our home in Roseburg, Oregon in the
fall of 2013. At that time we received
our first briefing on how the program works.
We later Skyped with them and got even more information. However, we didn’t really understand the
actual program in the DRC and what our responsibilities would be until we
arrived in the DRC on January 12, 2014.
The local partner is the Ministry of Public Health (more specifically
the Programme Nationale de Re-adaptation d’une Base Communitaire whose chief is
Dr. Willy Musafiri) but which will be referred to hereafter as the Ministry.
In 2011
the Dows developed a program in which some 350 wheelchairs were manufactured in
China, packaged , placed in a shipping container, and shipped to the DRC,
arriving in the port city of Matadi in about June 2012. Because the Congo River is not navigable from
Matadi to Kinshasa, the container was then loaded onto a truck and transported
to Kinshasa. Our predecessors, Elder and
sister Moon, had problems but ultimately were able to get the chairs released
from Customs and transferred to the Ministry’s warehouse in time for the Dows and four trainers from the USA to train
some twelve clinicians and twelve technicians (one each from the same health
clinic). The Ministry then began
prescribing and dispensing wheelchairs and providing monthly reports to the
Moons and the Dows.
As the
project appeared to be going satisfactorily, in 2013 Humanitarian Services
entered into a contract to deliver six containers of wheelchairs to the
Ministry, with the first two containers to arrive in the DRC in the first half
of 2014. As part of the project the Dows
and four more trainers were slated to arrive to provide two days of retraining
for the clinicians and technicians originally trained in 2012, and also to
provide five days of training to a new cadre of clinicians and technicians.
However,
during the latter part of 2013 the Ministry stopped sending reports. The Moons received tried but never really got
to the bottom of the problem. Three days
after we arrived in Kinshasa Elder Moon took me to the Ministry’s warehouse to
physically inventory the number of wheelchairs remaining from the 2011
project. We counted 40 chairs. Over the next few months I had numerous meetings
with Dr. Musafiri and his assistant, Nadine, to try and determine why we
weren’t getting detailed reports and to explain to them that the reports that
we had gotten were often
unsatisfactory. I learned that
the Ministry allowed other organizations to distribute some chairs; that the
Ministry occasionally turned over chairs to clinics without any record keeping,
assuming that the clinicians would provide the record keeping when they
prescribed and distributed the chairs, but in some cases the clinicians failed
to do so, and as a result the Ministry had some major gaps in its data base;
and that for some reason the Ministry distributed almost no chairs in the last
few months of 2013 and the first few months of 2014.
Later I learned that Dr. Musafiri’s
boss, Dr. lllllllllllllll, the actual Minister of Public Health, had asked Dr.
Musafiri to make some of the chairs available to him to distribute to his
political base in Katanga in the eastern part of the country. When Dr. Musafiri declined to do so, stating
that he had a protocol on chair distribution that he had to follow, the
Minister told him to stop distributing chairs.
So there were still 33 chairs
left in April 2014. At that time Dr.
Musafiri unilaterally lifted the ban on distributing chairs. In the meantime we continued to have our translator
Felix interview a few wheelchair recipients to get some data on how people were
actually benefitting from their chairs.
In March 2014 we received a bill of
lading indicating that a ship with two containers of wheelchairs for the 2013
project had left China bound for the DRC.
At that time we contacted the Dows and asked them to give us much more
specific information on our duties with respect to this shipment. They indicated that our duties included: securing a training venue for May 24-31;
purchasing a number of supplies including Crescent and/or open wrench sets,
hack saws, hand saws, tire pumps, hex wrenches and clipboards; ordering polo
shirts with the Church’s and Ministry’s logos; ensuring that the Ministry
invited the correct number of clinicians and technicians to attend the training
sessions, providing us with detailed information about them, and then ensuring
that they would show up for the training; ensuring that the Ministry would arrange
for handicapped people to attend the training sessions so the clinicians could
actually have experience assessing needs and prescribing chairs and technicians
could have experience building chairs, all under the supervision of the
trainers; ensuring that the Ministry would have the 33 wheelchairs at the
training venue; working with the Ministry to order assessment beds and foot
blocks for the clinicians; working up a closing ceremony with speakers from the
Church and certificates to honor the trainees; and perhaps the greatest duty of
all, providing lunch and two snacks for about 40 people over seven days of
training, plus a closing ceremony.
In April and early May we enlisted
our translator Felix’s assistance in ordering monogrammed shirts and purchasing
tools, and we spent much time sampling the wares of possible food vendors such
as grocery stores, restaurants and caterers.
We were happy to discover that we could get tools, shirts and food for
considerably less than the Dows’ stated budget.
We even decided to provide jugs of filtered water and reusable cups in
order to save money on beverages. We
continued to work with Dr. Musafiri as problems and misunderstandings
arose. For example, for the new trainees,
the instruction to Dr. Musafiri was to simply invite 24 people, one technician
and one clinician from 12 different facilities and to provide us with a list. Instead, he invited 33 people, invited
unequal numbers of clinicians and technicians with sometimes only one and
sometimes three or four from one facility, and identified people as both
clinician and technician for training purposes whereas a person could only be
trained as one or the other. So we asked
for changes, and the list was still being changed on the first day of training.
But since a wheelchair project
without wheelchairs isn’t much of a project, we also attempted to track the
progress of the ship and its valuable cargo of wheelchairs. The ship arrived in Matadi weeks behind schedule,
but still there was plenty of time to get the chairs delivered to the warehouse
in time for the training, particularly since the chairs were exempt from
customs because the Ministry of Public Health was identified as the
recipient/owner of the chairs. So we
just continued to query Dr. Musafiri about the progress of the chairs. In the meantime, the Dows were doing projects
in other countries in the SE Africa area, and so communication was sometimes
difficult.
But by early May we and the Dows
were getting quite concerned because Dr. Musafiri was reporting that: (a) Necotrans,
the local shipping company, was demanding payment of about $10,000 in order to
release the chairs, whereas the Church was insisting that everything had been
paid in advance; and (b) he couldn’t get his boss to write a letter to the
Minister of Finance to request issuance of a letter of exoneration to the
Director-General of Customs. I
frantically contacted Elder Kyungu, an Area 70, who is the brother-in-law of
the Minister of Health, to try to arrange for a meeting in order to urge the
Minister to send the letter. Then we
heard that he had finally sent the letter but that the Ministry of Finance had
lost the letter. Then they indicated
that they had found a copy of the letter but not the original and the original
was required. Then we were told that the
copy would suffice but the people surrounding the Minister of Finance were
keeping the letter from him, perhaps in hopes of getting some extra
compensation.
In the meantime our schedule had
gotten very difficult. In early May we
did a three day trip to Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, and then
did an eight day trip to Johannesburg for our SE Africa Humanitarian
Conference. At one point the Dows
indicated that they were going to cancel the training session because we could
not guarantee that the chairs would be liberated before the training was to
begin. In the end, however, they decided
that they could do the training with the 33 chairs that the Ministry had from
the 2011 project plus the two chairs that they could bring with them from the
US. So we had limited opportunity to
work with Dr. Musafiri and his chair problem until we returned from Johannesburg
and got to our office on May 19.
On that day I had a meeting with Dr. Musafiri to determine his level of
preparation for the project. I reminded
him that he needed: to get the clinicians and technicians that had been invited
to participate in the training to arrive at the Seminary & Institute (S
& I) building no later than 8 a.m.;
to get all of the wheelchairs that had not yet been distributed from the
2011 project to the building before Friday morning (I also got from him a
precise list of the sizes available); to get the assessment beds and foot
blocks built to the venue ( I also gave him $500 to offset his cost of building
the beds); to get disabled people to the
training venue on Saturday morning May 24 and again on Friday morning May 30
for assessments; and to get me the phone numbers of all of the participants so
I could have Felix call them and remind them of their commitments. I also had to rewrite the contract with our
food vendor to make her happy.
On May 23 I went to the S & I building to meet with the vendor to
get her signature on the new contract and to carefully go over the layout and
furnishing of the rooms with Crispin, the Church’s contractor who is
responsible for the building. Eventually
the van hired by Dr. Musafiri showed up to unload the boxes of wheelchairs that
were still in the Ministry’s warehouse.
The workers would not carry the 15 boxes into the building and stack
them in the designated room, so Crispin and I did it. They then declined to go pick up another 18
boxes that Dr. Musafiri had delivered to a clinic but that had not yet been
given to handicapped people until I paid them $15. Of course I could have refused, but that
would only have hurt our trainers coming later in the day from the US and
ultimately the handicapped people, so I gave them $10 and they took off to
fetch the chairs. All the while Crispin
was reminding me that hauling boxes of chairs was not in his job description
and so I should pay him something extra.
He also continued to remind me that normally he doesn’t work on
Saturdays so I would need to pay him something Saturday after the training session.
Friday morning, May 24, we left the apartment at 7 a.m., picked up four
dozen rolls from the neighborhood vendor, stopped at the Leon Hotel to meet the
trainers, and then set off for the S & I building. The trainers had a driver and van to get them
where they needed to go during their stay in Kinshasa. The training sessions planned for Friday and
Saturday were for people who had received the training in 2012, so it was to be
a refresher course. Surprisingly, three
trainees actually arrived before 8 a.m. so Glo put their names in a basket to
draw for a prize on Saturday (a motivational trick she used on her Sunday
School class in Roseburg to encourage them to come promptly to class and to
behave). Dr. Musafiri arrived about 8:30
a.m. All the while I was running around
madly trying to make sure the rooms were set up the way we wanted and to get
all of the supplies (tools primarily) out of the closet where Crispin had
locked them up for safekeeping.
The clinicians’ trainers, occupational therapists by training, were
Lara and Steve; the technicians’ trainers were Chris and Steve. It was fascinating to observe the trainers
in action and to see the peoples’ reaction; they seemed to absorb the
instruction like sponges. We also had
arranged for four translators each day, two for the clinicians and two for the
technicians.
We had planned on putting the clinicians and technicians in adjoining
classrooms, but when the technicians saw that we had put the boxes of
wheelchairs in the large multi—purpose room, which is normally used by the S
& I students as a game room and the room where we stored the chairs, they
indicated that they wanted to use that room so they would have easy access to
the chairs.
As for food, every day we planned on serving morning and afternoon
snacks consisting of rolls (with tubs of butter, peanut butter or Nutella
available) or cookies and then a beverage, water or soda. We had a caterer hired for four days but the
other days we planned on picking up sandwiches.
For each meal or snack I counted on 40 people to make sure I had enough
for the trainees, the trainers, the missionaries, the translators, some ex-pat
friends who came by occasionally to see if they could help us in some way (one
woman brought us huge containers of water for us to serve), and Crispin
who continually reminded me that he had
arrived at 5 a.m. (instead of his normal 6 a.m.) to make sure that the building
was clean and the chairs and tables were all set up for us. Fortunately I was successful in getting a
cash advance from our supervisors at the SE Africa Area offices in Johannesburg
so I had plenty of funds to use without having to dip into my own pocket.
We set up one of the classrooms as the primary snack and meal room,
with beverages on one end of adjoining tables and the food on the other
end. Gloria was in charge of the
food. On Friday I left around 11:15 a.m.
to drive to Chez Victoire where I ordered 40 huge chicken baguette sandwiches
for only $2 and change. As for water,
initially we dispensed plastic cups to everyone, and put their names on the cups
so they could reuse them to access our water jugs, but the cheap cups started
to crack. So we bought plastic water
bottles, again hoping that people would reuse them to access the water jugs. However, one woman in particular complained
that it was unsanitary to reuse a plastic bottle and that we should supply as
many fresh bottles as people wanted. Ultimately
we resolved the issue by just start buying fresh water bottles for
everyone. As a result I had to make
daily trips to Shop Rite, the grocery store across the street from the church,
to refresh our supply of bottled water.
I also had to make sure that the tools and supplies were in good
working order. Two days prior to the
trainers’ arrival I was asked to find a projector because the clinicians wanted
to do power point and video presentations, and when we showed up at the venue
Friday morning we discovered that an extension cord was needed. I scrounged a cord so they could get started,
only to find out that the projector didn’t work. So I had to run over to our office to find
another one, only to determine that the problem was with the extension cord,
not the projector. After that I just
brought an extension cord from our apartment.
The technicians also announced that they needed a hack saw and an
electric drill, so I bought a hack saw and was able to borrow a battery-powered
drill from Elder Gates, the construction missionary. The clinicians brought heavy plasticized
posters, but they wouldn’t stay up on the heavily textured walls properly
despite my best efforts.
Saturday even more trainees showed up on time, as the word had gone out
that a prize would be offered at the end of the training but only to someone
who had arrived on time. At the
afternoon break we offered sodas instead of water to those who showed up on
time, and one of the technicians won the drawing: 5,000 FC cash to help with
the cost of his transportation. The
trainees had a great time getting into the chairs themselves and taking them
outside to the parking lot to test them.
The driveway down to the church had a fairly substantial incline, so the
people got to test the chairs by going both uphill and downhill. We took some great photos.
In the afternoon some handicapped people arrived to be fitted for
chairs. The clinicians assessed the
condition of the patients and then ordered chairs to be assembled or even
rebuilt from the technicians. Some of
the chairs come with four wheels, and are more suitable for indoor use on flat
terrain. Other chairs come with three
wheels for rugged terrain and better maneuverability. But all chairs require upper body strength
and mobility so quadriplegics and others without the use of their arms cannot
be issued one of our chairs. Also the chair sizes vary but are only for adults.
The first patient was a young man about 20 years old suffering from the
effects of childhood polio; not only were his legs useless they were only about
1 inch in diameter. The second was a
woman who had limited upper body mobility but also needed to travel some
distance each day to sell her wares.
That posed a challenge for the clinicians; some thought she needed a # 4
wheel chair; others thought a # 3 wheel chair.
The trainers were able to guide the trainees through the evaluation
process to help them better understand that fitting a chair requires a lot of
analysis. The third was a beautifully
dressed tiny mature woman who obviously was a polio victim. She had actually been carried to the venue by
her devoted younger sister. We were
drawn to these people and took a number of photos.
Sunday of course was a day off to attend church. After church we had dinner guests—all six of
the wheelchair people, Hugh Matheson (American land developer who spends much
of his time in Kinshasa), Ryan and Larry (the temple construction men), and our
single Congolese friend Eloi.
Monday May 26 began week two of the training, which is for working
clinicians and technicians who did not have the Church’s training program in
2012. They were advised that if they
completed all five days of training they would receive certificates from the
World Health Organization. As per our
daily custom, I ran down to the street and bought five dozen rolls for our
morning snack. When we got to the
training venue we discovered that most of the people to be trained were waiting
for us. On the other hand, the trainers
got off to a late start, got stuck in the Monday traffic jams, and arrived
late. Fortunately, there was a bit of an
afternoon lull and I was able to escape for a couple of hours to the office to
try and get caught up on some of our accumulating other business.
On Tuesday we still did not have the benefit of the 664 wheelchairs
sitting in the transporter Necotrans warehouse. However, Elder Kyungu was finally able to
get me an appointment with the Minister of Public Health to see if he could
persuade the Minister of Finance to issue the necessary letter of exoneration
to give to the Director-General of Customs so we could liberate our chairs once
the dispute with Necotrans was resolved.
The Minister who promised to do what he could to help.
We also spent quite a bit of time this week discussing the contractual
dispute with Necotrans with Dr. Musafiri and emailing with the Church employees
in Salt Lake and their contacts with CMA, the Church’s shipping company that
transported the chairs from China to the DRC.
I also helped Dr. Dow create French language certificates for the
trainees and the Ministry and planning the closing ceremony in which the
certificates would be presented. We
invited a counselor in the Kinshasa Stake presidency to conduct the meeting and
give a speech. Gloria and I also went to
a pastry shop to select and pick up a variety of pastries for the closing
ceremony. So we spent every day at the
training venue but at least I got to leave from time to time to take care of
office business and to pick up food and beverages
On Friday May 30 we had a very nice closing ceremony attended by our
Mission President Bryce Cook. The trainees
were delighted with what they had accomplished and with the polo shirts we
provided. They took multiple pictures
of each other. I’m sure they developed
some wonderful contacts among their peers that will be of benefit to them
professionally. And of course we
benefited many handicapped people. In
the evening we got together with the Dows and the trainers for a final pizza
party at the apartment of the Westland Construction people who are building
chapels for the church in the DRC and who have the contract to build a temple
in Kinshasa. However, as of the date of
this report, June 29, the new shipment of chairs was still unavailable to the
Ministry and the clinicians due to various Customs and shipper disputes. It seems that nothing is easy to accomplish
in the DRC.
