Whirlwind Wheelchairs.

• Author: Hardman, Chris
• Position: Whirlwind Wheelchairs International offers help in wheelchair design and repair in developing countries

When American engineer Ralf Hotchkiss visited Managua, Nicaragua, in 1980, his life changed. Since a 1966 motorcycle accident Hotchkiss has used a wheelchair. On his Nicaragua trip he met a group of wheelchair riders who were critical of his home-made chair. They evaluated his design and predicted its faults. "It was very clear from that day that I had finally met ... people who could help me toward my goals better than anybody I'd met anywhere," Hotchkiss says.

So he joined forces with Nicaraguan wheelchair riders Omar Talavera, Thelma Ayala, and Hector Segovia to achieve their shared goal of building a better wheelchair. With funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, they set up a small shop and began designing inexpensive, innovative wheelchairs.

What Hotchkiss saw during his trip to Nicaragua was representative of the desperate need for wheelchairs throughout Latin America. In Managua, he met fourteen people sharing one wheelchair that had broken in more than twenty places. "It was just a wreck. It was an American hospital model that had been donated to Nicaragua," Hotchkiss recalls. "They said the first break happened in the first week, the next break in the next week, and it was downhill from there."

Because very few wheelchairs are manufactured in developing countries, Latin American wheelchair riders use either fifty-pound hand-me-downs from U.S. hospitals or nothing at all. The donated wheelchairs cannot handle the rough terrain of rural villages, and when the chairs break, there is no inexpensive way to fix them.

"Everywhere I've been, behind every rehab center, I've seen a large pile of American and European chairs rusting," he says. "They served somebody for a little while, gave them a bit of encouragement, and then hit them in the face with a total failure."

Hotchkiss says that most people never even have the opportunity for mobility, because no more than 1 or 2 percent of the 20 million people in the third world who need a wheelchair has one today.

In 1989 Hotchkiss started the Wheeled Mobility Center (now called Whirlwind Wheelchair International) at San Francisco State University and began developing an international network of wheelchair activists and designers. That same year he received a $260,000 "genius" grant from the MacArthur...