Goodwill Salvages Lives in South America : Aid: A Santa Ana charitable group is sending to Uruguay the wheelchairs, crutches and other items that used to be sold for scrap or taken to landfills.

It was only a used wheelchair. But to Ruth Diaz, a 14-year-old teen-ager in Uruguay, the gift meant everything.

“It changed her life,” said George Kessinger, who as head of Goodwill Industries in Orange County sent the wheelchair with a 500-pound shipment of used clothing and other goods in Goodwill’s first experiment in South America.

“With the economy worsening in her country, there’s no way people like Ruth can ever be able to afford a wheelchair, even a used one. But we had several older wheelchairs donated to us and dozens and dozens of crutches just sitting in our warehouse, so we shipped them down to a Goodwill in Montevideo where she lives,” said Kessinger, who just returned from the capital of Uruguay.

For Ruth, who has waged a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy that has included numerous operations on her hip and legs, the silla de ruedas , or wheelchair, meant a marvelous new mobility.

The chair, which has become her most valuable possession, would have been dismantled in the United States and sold for scrap, just like the aluminum and wood crutches that also were shipped to Uruguay.

“Here we have all these crutches lying around, both wood and aluminum, that we have our people take apart and sell for salvage,” Kessinger said. “We’re getting only perhaps 3 cents a pound and this is a product that can be used by people all over the world. It’s just ridiculous. We wanted to transfer the value over.”

Until now, discards such as clothes that have gone out of style, old typewriters and even broken orthopedic equipment are taken from bins at the Goodwill in Santa Ana and sent to a landfill. Leonel Barragan, a Goodwill executive in charge of its salvage operation, says that will change.

“What we want to send to Uruguay is salvage that can definitely be fixed, repaired and be brought back to life with some technical skills that can be taught through training in an area where labor is cheap. Therefore, it becomes cost effective. Instead of sending them to the landfill, we are putting them in use again,” Barragan said.

For years, Kessinger, who has established one of the top 10 Goodwill centers in the nation, employing 740 people and operating 10 retail outlets for refurbished goods, has thought about expanding the reach of Goodwill in other countries.

Since Goodwill is headquartered in Santa Ana, where more than half the city’s 300,000 residents are Latino, Kessinger said he wanted to build a bridge to another Spanish-speaking area.

But it wasn’t easy.

Kessinger first turned to Goodwill’s international headquarters in Bethesda, Md., for help. But resources from that office’s three-person department handling international programs was limited. A frustrated Kessinger waited, until one day “I just picked up a brochure on Goodwill in Montevideo, pointed to a map and said, ‘Let’s contact them!’ ”

Glitches such as shipment costs, which are astronomical, developed.

When the first shipment arrived in Uruguay, “their customs people thought that because it was so valuable to be air-freighted that their import fee was higher than the worth of the materials inside,” Kessinger said. “We tried to explain, but the customs people weren’t convinced.”

Both Goodwill programs have been lobbying for customs help from officials in Uruguay. The wife of Uruguayan President Luis Alberto Lacalle has expressed an interest and a visit to the Montevideo Goodwill is being arranged.

By U.S. standards, the Goodwill operation in Montevideo is small. It employs only a handful of staff members, but the need is great, said Ruben Alvarez, Goodwill’s executive director.

The average worker earns the equivalent of $80 a month, which makes owning a car or a home “extremely difficult,” Alvarez said. Inflation is skyrocketing, and the Persian Gulf crisis has boosted gasoline to $4 a gallon, he said.

“What you see in Uruguay is that it’s so much more difficult to be poor down there, much worse than here,” said Dr. R. William Buster, a Santa Ana physician and Goodwill’s board chairman in Orange County. “Down there they don’t throw anything away. Used goods are handed down from family to family or to maid or butler, but not to Goodwill.”

Buster and his wife, Charlotte, accompanied Kessinger to Uruguay.

Along with the wheelchair, Kessinger and Barragan packed a used typewriter--a key to their operation. The idea is to allow trainees in Montevideo to learn how to refurbish used U.S. goods, then raise money by selling them to local residents. Without this help, argue officials at Goodwill’s international headquarters in Maryland, the future is bleak for handicapped people in developing countries.

“The object of programs like this is to teach these services overseas so people in other countries can provide their own programs to help the disabled. We’re enabling people to help themselves,” said David M. Cooney, president of Goodwill Industries of America Inc.

For Barragan, 39, who was born in Mexico, the project--and Ruth’s gift--have special meaning.

Born with polio, Barragan walks with a severe limp and wears a metal brace on his left leg.

“I can remember the problems I had as a boy growing up in Mexico,” he said. “There was no place near where I was born in Michoacan to get a brace, so every year my family took me to Mexico City to get one. And every year I would outgrow the brace because I was growing up. But without it, I couldn’t walk.

“It’s programs like these that are worthwhile.”