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Articles from the Wheelchair Foundation headquarters in Danville, CA and major news source outlets.

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Around Danville: Team from East Bay helps Haiti

JEFF BEHRING, of Blackhawk, and a team of volunteers flew to Haiti on Jan. 27 on a humanitarian mission following the Caribbean nation’s devastating Jan. 12 earthquake.

“My father loaned his plane and flight crew to send doctors, nurses, wheelchairs and medical supplies donated by John Muir (Medical Center of Walnut Creek) and Medshare to Haiti,” Jeff’s brother, David Behring, the president of the Wheelchair Foundation, wrote in an e-mail to me.

The plane, owned by Kenneth Behring, a Blackhawk developer and philanthropist, is an MD-87 outfitted to seat 24, with plenty of cargo space.

I spoke with Jeff last week following his Jan. 30 return.

“There are tent cities set up everywhere — plastic tarps with stakes holding them up,” he said. “People are afraid to go back into their houses and buildings (Haiti has been subject to continuous aftershocks). There was a 7 p.m. curfew and you didn’t want to drive after that because people were sleeping in the middle of the road, I was told.”

Jeff said they set up camp in a big grassy area near the airport, where search-and-rescue teams were just leaving.

Three different makeshift medical areas were established around the island, including one right next to the epicenter, and lines of people soon formed for treatment.

“The doctors and nurses were treating wounds and infections. People had been patched up quickly right after the earthquake and then needed additional surgery. I did a lot of ‘gofer’ work — whatever I could to help the medical team,” Jeff said.

Charli Butterfield, the foundation’s assistant director of distribution, handled logistics for the flights and crew.

She stayed with the plane, which returned to the U.S. to pick up additional medical supplies and 16 more medical staff, then flew back to Haiti.

Included on the plane from the Bay Area were 30 wheelchairs for hospitals to use immediately, Jeff said.

Another 520 wheelchairs are on the way, and it’s hoped that funds can be raised to send thousands more wheelchairs.

To provide additional help, proceeds from the foundation’s eighth annual charity ball Feb. 27 at the Blackhawk Museum are designated to provide “Mobility for Haiti.” The gala evening will begin at 5:30 p.m. and include hors d’oeuvres, dinner, dancing, silent and live auctions and a live stage show.

Admission is $150 per person. For tickets, contact Jeff at 925-648-3829 or je*********@wi***********.org.

Physicians from John Muir included orthopedists Torsten Jacobsen and Abid Qureshi and Ramin Mehmande, an orthopedist and plastic surgeon, Jeff said.

Other Bay Area volunteers included Ben Drew, executive director of John Muir Medical Center, and Chuck Haupt, executive director of Medshare in San Leandro, who was one of the main organizers of the trip.

Dan Catullo, of DC3 Music Group LLC, led arrangements from Los Angeles, receiving support from David Archuleta, New Kids on the Block, Creed, Godsmack and other celebrities.

Scott Stapp, lead singer for Creed, went along on the flight to Haiti and joined Jeff and Glen Perry in providing “gofer” assistance as needed.

For information on the Wheelchair Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to deliver a wheelchair to anyone worldwide who needs one, visit www.wheelchairfoundation.org or call 925-736-1571. Each $75 donation helps deliver a wheelchair.

SOURCE: Contra Costa Times

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Couple lands in Haiti to begin new life with humanitarian group

Peter and Sara Craig have finally started working in Haiti after finding transportation there aboard a private jet.

The couple, along with their sons, Noah, 4, and Abram, almost 2, are moving to Haiti from Hillsboro, Ore., to begin work with Clean Water for Haiti, a humanitarian aid organization that works to provide clean, drinkable water for Haitian families. They arrived there Jan. 30.

The Craigs were winging their way across the United States en route to Haiti when the killer earthquake struck Port-au-Prince on Jan 12. They were turned back at Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and waited two frustrating weeks at Sara’s parents’ Longview home before finding a ride with The Wheelchair Foundation. The nonprofit organization, based in Danville, Calif., has delivered 600 wheelchairs to Haiti and plans to send more using the founder’s private jet.

The Craigs, who were the subject of a Jan. 19 story in The Daily News, have settled into their home about 40 miles north of Port-au-Prince. The area was not affected by the earthquake.

“Aid groups have been giving out camping tents, and people have pitched them in every open space in the city,” he wrote on Jan. 31 in the family’s blog, ourordinaryjourney.blogspot.com. “Look at the median the next time you are merging onto the freeway and imagine seeing hundreds of people camping there waiting for who knows what. From what we were exposed to, it wasn’t so much the intensity of the situation that was overwhelming. It was the number of people who have been affected.”

Craig ended the Jan. 31 entry saying how thankful he and Sara are for a safe house, electricity, clean water and ample food and how blessed they feel when most of the population is struggling.

“As we begin this new chapter in our lives, we are overwhelmed by how many things we have to be thankful for,” he wrote, “and this is only the beginning.”

SOURCE : tdn.com

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Gifts lighten parents' burden

KUALA TERENGGANU: Raising six school-going children is hard on any parent. But for roti canai seller Zulkifli Awang and his wife, Rotipah Chik, the task has been monumental. Two of their children have cerebral palsy.

Ahmad Fahmi, 8, and Zul Ashraf, 10, cannot walk. Both of them are carried by their mother to attend a special class daily at SK Padang Hiliran in Bukit Besar near here.

Rotary Club members presenting Zul Ashraf Zulkifli, 10 (left) and Ahmad Fahmi Zulkifli, 8, with their wheelchairs. With them is their mother, Rotipiah Chik (extreme right).

Now, thanks to the Kuala Terengganu Rotary Club which donated wheelchairs to the family yesterday, the two children can move around without having to depend on their mother so much.

Zulkifli, 44, said they had been saving up to purchase wheelchairs for the two boys but money had been tight, especially as a wheelchair cost more than RM1,000.

“It would have taken us some time to raise money to buy the wheelchairs. We are grateful for this gift from the Rotary Club,” he said after receiving the wheelchairs from club president Philip Lee at Mydin Mall yesterday.

Two other cerebral palsy children, Mohd Fazuddin Awang, 9, also from SK Padang Hiliran, and Mohd Luqman Nurhakim Muhammad, 10, from SK Kompleks Seberang Takir, were also presented with a wheelchair each.

Lee said two wheelchairs were presented to senior citizens Ong Siew Gaik, 65, and Mariaye Ellapan, 66.

One wheelchair was donated to the neurology unit at Sultanah Nur Zahirah Hospital and another to Kuala Terengganu Parkinson’s Disease Association.

“The wheelchairs are a gift from the Wheelchair Foundation of Rotary International in the United States,” he said.

SOURCE: New Straits Times

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Danville's Wheelchair Foundation sends supplies, medical workers to Haiti

DANVILLE — Tim Miller didn’t think about going to Haiti. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, the thought just never crossed his mind, as there was no way the registered nurse from Fresno could get to the earthquake-stricken Caribbean island country more than 3,000 miles away.

Then a family member — an attorney for Danville’s Wheelchair Foundation — called. The nonprofit, which has sent more than 800,000 wheelchairs in almost 10 years to countries around the world, was sending a private airliner filled with medical workers and supplies to aid to the country devastated by the magnitude 7.0 earthquake on Jan. 12.

The trip changed his life.

“I’ll go any chance I get,” said Miller, who has been on missionary trips to Mexico but nothing like the one he and a handful of others from Selma Community Hospital made last week.

Though he had spent a few years in an intensive care unit before taking his current job a year ago, Miller said he had never seen such suffering. “Every single family has been torn apart.”

The foundation made the trip last week, using the private MD-87 airplane of housing developer Ken Behring, the nonprofit’s founder, said Jeff Behring, a son who volunteered on the trip.

The plane, based in Stockton, made two trips between Wednesday and Saturday that week. The first was to Southern California and then Fort Lauderdale, Fla., before heading to Haiti — picking up people and supplies along the way. It then returned to Florida to get more people and supplies before returning back to Haiti.

Besides the delivery, Jeff Behring said, they also ferried medical workers who were looking for flights back. In total they brought 12,000 pounds of medical supplies and transported about 30 workers, he said.

Behring said a lot of the work was bringing antibiotics and other supplies for small problems that can turn big,

“Even the minor stuff can turn to amputation if you don’t take care of it,” he said. The supplies came from John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek and nonprofit MedShare in San Leandro, he said.

Behring said the effort was sparked after a music industry-related company, which was also looking at ways to support the organization, called asking about putting together some help. Besides big name acts like New Kids on the Block and Rage Against the Machine giving support, Scott Stapp, the lead singer of the band Creed, went with them to help, Behring said.

Behring said it’s unknown if there will be another plane trip, as the group wants to maximize its continuing help.

In addition to the help by plane, about 520 wheelchairs from the foundation will get there by boat in about six weeks. They are going first to hospitals, but will eventually go to patients. The group hopes to send another 1,500. He said the wheelchairs, which are new, cost about $150 each.

Miller, the nurse from Fresno, said seeing children suffer was the hardest. He worked in tent facilities, one for minor wounds and infections and another for more serious needs, like amputations. At the latter, he said there were two to four staff members for every 75 to 80 patients.

He said one father came in with a child suffering from a distended abdomen, a result of the breast-fed baby’s mother dying. An 8-year-old girl came in with a perforated appendicitis.

“If she hadn’t gotten there when she did she would have died,” he said. “It was touch and go, but in the morning she woke up and smiled.”

But then there are those he could not help, like a boy with a depressed skull fracture, who was paralyzed — he had received major injuries when his dad frantically tried digging his family from rubble.

“He probably wasn’t going to make it very long,” Miller said.

For more information go to www.planetohaiti.org or www.wheelchairfoundation.org

SOURCE: Contra Costa Times

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