wheels for ecuador

In May 2006, Ken Coonrad and his wife attended a Rotary Club  conference in Valdez. Both had been Rotarians for awhile, keen on helping others and hoping to pick up some new ideas at the conference to bring back home to their club in Wasilla.

Rotary, a national service organization, has more than 32,000 clubs in more than 200 countries. Rotary’s primary purpose is to bring together business and professional leaders to provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations and help build goodwill and peace in the world.

“Service above Self” is Rotary’s motto.

At the conference, Ken Coonrad was moved to tears.

“There was this touching video of a person walking on their hands using bricks, with no legs,” Coonrad said. “In the movie, he reaches the bottom of the path and someone picks him up and puts him in a wheelchair. The Wheelchair Foundation was trying to raise awareness and funds for their cause, so my wife and I decided, let’s do this for our club.”

Ken Coonrad, a former 11-year resident of Wasilla who now resides in Las Vegas, Nev., presented the Wheelchair Foundation’s (WF) campaign to his group at Wasilla Sunrise Rotary (WSR).

For eight years, the WF has led an international effort to create awareness of the needs and abilities of people with physical disabilities, to hopefully deliver a wheelchair to every child, teen and adult in the world who needs one but cannot afford it.

Since 2000, WF has delivered more than 672,000 wheelchairs to 152 countries and geographical areas around the globe, the organization reports.

Former WSR president Jerry Moses was presented with the WF donation idea and agreed it would be the perfect cause to fulfill the local club’s international project requirements, a wide-scale service project accomplished by the club each year.

“We proceeded with a fund-raising drive and between August of 2006 and May of 2007, we had raised more than $20,000 for the purchase of 260 wheelchairs,” Coonrad said.

Next, the wheelchairs needed a destination.

A Rotary exchange student, simply named Sebas, who was attending Wasilla High School in the 2006-07 school year, told members of the troubles back home. Poverty in the towns of Ecuador was rampant and especially hard on the physically challenged, many of whom were unable to meet simple medical needs — including obtaining wheelchairs.

Rotary members took heed and Ecuador was chosen as the destination for the chairs.

After a location had been chosen, the process gained steam.

Money was quickly sent to the WF for the purchase of the 260 chairs, extensive paperwork was filled out and coordination efforts with Rotary Clubs in Ecuador intensified. By November, a distribution day was chosen: Feb. 11, 2008.

At the time, no one from WSR could travel due to scheduling issues, so Coonrad took the reigns in Las Vegas, booking a flight to attend the distribution day in Ecuador.

In Quito, he received the grand tour of the Ecuadorian capital from Sebas, who is now back home, and his family, which picked Coonrad up and drove north for several hours.

In a letter to the WSR, Coonrad told of the country he had grown to love from the day he arrived, taking in Ecuador’s landscape.

“I saw literally several square miles of greenhouses where 70 percent of the world’s roses are grown,” he said. “We toured the local open markets and craft fairs, and then had dinner at a really fancy restaurant. Ecuador seemed to be a country of extremes. Either you had nothing or you had everything.”

Earlier in the week, Ecuador’s Tungurahua volcano had erupted, sending miles of ash plume into the ozone and driving thousands from their homes. Coonrad said that when he arrived, people were wearing face masks, confused, and trying not to inhale the ashy air. He grabbed a mask and got to work.

“Being Alaskan, I’m used to that,” he said of digging in and getting to the job at hand.

At 4:30 a.m. Feb. 11, it was time to take the chairs to the people. Coonrad and Rotary members stationed in Quito were on the road and heading towards Riobamba, a city about three hours south of Quito, where many of the chairs were to find new owners.

The Quito Club had worked with the Catholic Diocese and local priests to identify more than 200 of the area’s handicapped that needed the chairs the most.

Afterwards, Coonrad wrote to his friends at the WSR of the experience.

“All the way there I was worried that the wheelchairs were going to be distributed to folks that really didn’t need them or something was amiss with the plan,” Coonrad wrote. “It only took me two minutes after we arrived to realize that I was wrong.”

Coonrad remembers the day as if it were yesterday, when the Catholic church where the distribution was scheduled saw numerous town residents and volunteers carrying in the needy to where the chairs were.

They carried them in their arms, on their backs and in anyway they could.

Coonrad said the grateful recipients are living with cerebral palsy, Down syndrome or are victims of stroke or amputation.

Coonrad, who doesn’t speak any Spanish, was able to communicate with five of the nine Quito Rotary members, who helped translate the reactions.

“So much emotion was happening, I couldn’t get it together,” he said. “After a bit, I got my composure and we started organizing the chairs and putting the Rotary stickers on them. About five minutes later, I heard my name being called and looked up. From the side of the church, I saw one of the Quito Rotarians directing a middle-aged woman to me. She came at a dead run to me, hugged me and hugged me, all the while saying, ‘Thank you thank you. God bless you, God bless you.’ in broken English.”

Soon the church service started and Coonrad was ushered to the front of the church to sit with the Bishop of Riobamba.

After the Mass, the distribution started and folks were carried to the chairs, had their pictures taken, were given food and drink and were allowed to leave.

Coonrad said that much happiness, tears, joy, blessings and good was done on that day.

Emotions ran high as the realization of what mobility means to the recipients hit home.

“I was the worst,” Coonrad said. “The one who was the most emotional, a pleasant lady named Lorena Vaca from the Quito Rotary, would look me and we would both just start crying. The big finalization of what we were doing [reaching] fruition was powerful. Here we had been on this project for one-and-a-half years, and it was finally transpiring. It was very emotional.”

Coonrad and his family had moved at the end of August 2007 to Las Vegas, where he joined the Northwest Rotary Club. A retired North Slope construction worker, Coonrad had plenty of time to jump right in with service in the public sector of Las Vegas, as he had done in Wasilla.

He had been a member of the WSR for  two years and wasn’t about to stop doing humanitarian work.

“The folks at the Wasilla Sunshine Rotary are hard working and very professional. I learned a lot there,” he said.

Coonrad said he is still in contact every day with members of the Quito Rotary, checking on the progress of some of the wheelchair recipients and just to say hello.

A Powerpoint presentation in Spanish was recently sent to Coonrad from Quito Rotary members, outlining the success of the wheelchair project and comments from some of those with the chairs.

He plans to return to Wasilla in July to present to Rotarians here a slide show as well as home movies from his time spent in Ecuador.

“Being a Rotary member is first and foremost about service, getting above yourself. It’s more than putting money in the pot at church, or ringing a bell at the mall,” he said. “My wife joined the Rotary before me and so I saw what they were doing, saying to myself, ‘I can do this.’ Once I came home and retired I was looking for something to do.”

Contact J.J. Harrier at valleylife@frontiersman.com, or 352-2269.