We received the amazing story and photos below from Glen Mather and our partners from ChairTheLove.org in Florida.
It’s Just a Wheelchair Like Any Other
“The hurricanes last year have turned our Bahamian Islands upside down, and we have a desperate need for wheelchairs”. We got the e-mail back in November 2020, right in the teeth of Covid-19. The ability to distribute the wheelchairs with our donors was not possible, but we could feel the desperation in their message.
The note came from the area Rotarians, always willing to help and partner with Chair the Love worldwide to assist us in providing mobility to the neediest. Unable to ignore their plea, our generous donors, combined with others from the Wheelchair Foundation, pulled together the funds to purchase an entire container of Wheelchairs (280), to be delivered directly from the factory to the Bahamas.
Because large crowds were discouraged by Covid restrictions, the chairs were given out, many just one-by-one, at the homes of the recipients. Our Rotarian friends provided to Chair the Love a continual stream of photos, each one more touching than the last.
One of the distributions resulted in two chairs winding up at the Grand Bahama Children’s Home in Freeport. This amazing facility provides for 32 children from infants to 14 whose parents are unable to care for their development or physical needs. It is there that our donated Wheelchair and the dear young boy sitting in it met the Prince, yes Prince William.
It seems that the Prince, together with Princess Kate were in the Bahamas for a goodwill tour of several Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean. Evidently, Prince William was as taken as we were at Chair the Love with this young man and his joy. The story and photos were featured in news features both on Yahoo and Fox News.
It just served to underscore the impact that each one of our donors have to change the lives of others, mostly outside the purview of a Prince and Princess.
These are the same faces we see on every distribution, and due to many of you, we will give thousands more this year the same gift of mobility.