Jeanine, one of our Free Wheelchair Mission staff members, manages our database. She recently went to Chile on a mission trip.

Free Wheelchair Mission feels it is important that employees know first hand the experience of distributing wheelchairs to the disabled poor. This past week I was often struck by the love, endurance, pain, and sacrifice of those who cared for disabled family members. One morning, our group drove to an area well outside the city of Santiago. For several hours we went from one home to the next delivering wheelchairs to people with all sorts of disabilities.

  Among the last people we visited was 98 year old Miguel Sevedra. His little farm was unkempt. Mr. Sevedra´s daughter welcomed us into a large room constructed of wooden slats on a dirt floor. In contrast to the scene outside, this room was very neat, swept clean of the dust that covered everything outside. His daughter had bathed and shaved him and dressed him carefully. He was covered with an impeccably clean blanket. It was clear that his entire daughter’s energy went into her father’s care.

She had lost her mother when she was very young, and she began to cry as she told us that Mr. Sevedra had been both father and mother to her. He was diagnosed with cancer four years earlier, and it was now advanced. A few days before, he had received a dose of morphine to help with the pain. She knew he didn’t have long to live, and tears showed her dread of his passing.

She told us of a local festival that brought the family some comfort just a few weeks earlier. The festival of Quasimodo began over a hundred years ago to protect the priests from thieves who stole the gold and silver communion vessels. So the townspeople began to accompany the priests in procession, and now the people commemorate this once a year by following the priest on horseback as he goes from one house to another. Hundreds of people on horseback had accompanied the priest when he visited Mr. Sevedra to give him communion.  This tradition had meant a great deal to Mr. Sevedra’s daughter, perhaps easing, however briefly, the sense of isolation she must have felt and allowing her father to feel part of a community as he had been unable to do since being confined to his bed. The wheelchair, I thought, would allow her to take her father out of the house and perhaps to enjoy the company of neighbors again.