A Guatemalan Rehab Story
From: Joyce Ennis
In February of 2011, I had the opportunity to go to Guatemala on a medical mission. One
of the places we visited and set up a clinic was in the small village of La Avanzada. This
is an extremely poor village high in the mountains. The main work of the people in this
area is picking coffee beans and harvesting bananas and plantains.
On our second day in the village, the mayor came to us and told us about a young man
named Ishmael. Ishmael is in his mid twenties. About three years ago, he was up at the
top of a banana tree when he fell to the ground. He injured his back and is paraplegic.
The mayor asked if anyone in our group knew anything about repairing wheelchairs as
Ishmael’s chair was broken. The spokesperson for our group indicated that I might know
how to do this as I had been a rehabilitation nurse for many years. The doctor in my
group and an interpreter were taken about an eighth of a mile away to Ishmael’s home.
As I entered the home—I found it to be like many others in this area—a wooden hut with
no windows and no electricity. The floor is packed earth and the roof is tin held on by
rocks. I was ushered into his room. The room was totally dark and I had to use a
flashlight to see this young man. He was lying on his stomach on his bed. He asked us to
look at his back where he had some surgery about a year prior. The site was well healed
and the first thing that hit me was that he had no skin breakdown of any kind. I
discovered that his wife is his caregiver and rubs his skin with lotions as many times a
day as she can—that is when she is not in the coffee fields picking beans.
I asked for his chair and was shown a white plastic outdoor chair with four wheels of
different sizes and styles duct taped to the legs. There was a large crack down the middle
of the seat and one wheel was broken. I said I could not fix his chair and it was evident
that they were sad that I could not. I was told that Ishmael had not been outside of his
bedroom for over a year-ever since his chair broke.
I really felt like I had to do something. That evening back at our hotel, I sent an e-mail to
the Wheelchair Recycling Center of Madison and Brookfield—a place I knew about
because WARN has donated money to them as a community project. I also was able to
use our phone to call the church that sponsors us to see what we could do to pay for a
chair. Within two days, church members had raised enough money to purchase a
wheelchair from the Center and to my surprise we even were able to get a Jay cushion!!
A week later, the church was sending a construction team to the same location. They
were able to deliver the chair to Ishmael. A few days later I received the attached photo
showing Ishmael and his family –he is in his new chair outside in the sun.
If it wasn’t for all the rehab friends I have back here in Wisconsin, I would not have
known what to do to help. Thank you from Ishmael and myself.