Gifts Provide Vietnamese With ‘Dignified Mobility’

On a gray, rainy morning they had come to the hospital, one family amid a throng of the unfortunate--some with legs ruined by disease, some with no legs at all, the victims of war.

Eric Braverman scanned the crowd and now focused on this family--a mother, a father, the son he cradled in his arms.

He was about Adam’s size, about Adam’s age. Like Adam, this boy had cerebral palsy; even some of his physical spasms reminded Braverman of the son who had died one year before. When Braverman looked at the boy’s parents--at their loving, playful devotion--he saw himself and his wife, Laura. When he learned they lacked the proper paperwork for the gift of a wheelchair, Braverman was all the more certain.

This boy would get Adam’s old chair. Huu Ton, age 12, would be one of more than 750 disabled Vietnamese who received donated wheelchairs earlier this year--for all but a few, their first wheelchairs ever.

These people were the latest among thousands of disabled people around the world who in recent years have benefited from a small network of American charities that work from the proverb that one man’s junk may be another man’s treasure.

Time and again this truth was borne out as teams of volunteers from two American charities, one based in the Midwest and one in North Hollywood, fanned out from Ho Chi Minh City to five locales. It was true in Danang and Nha Trang. It was true at a leprosy village outside Pleiku and among polio victims in Tuy Hoa. And it was true within the Citadel walls of Hue, the gathering place for a disproportionate number of ex-soldiers and civilians who had been crippled by land mines.

Wheelchairs are an uncommon luxury in much of the world, and in Vietnam, the legacy of war has made the inequity that much greater. In this poor country where, according to U.S. State Department estimates, the per-capita income is $320 a year and the annual government spending on health care amounts to less than $4 per capita, the gratitude for these gifts was palpable.

In Ho Chi Minh City, a 16-year-old boy whose severely deformed legs required him to scuttle crab-like along the ground crawled into a sports wheelchair and was soon racing across a courtyard, raising his arms like a triumphant Olympian. In Hue, a 59-year-old woman crippled in childhood said she had waited more than 50 years for her first wheelchair. More than once, the recipients shed tears of joy.

“This is the first time I haven’t just looked at people’s feet,” a crippled man in Nha Trang told a volunteer. “Now I can look at people’s faces.”

“It’s not just about mobility. It’s about dignified mobility,” said Mark Richard, manager of international ministries for Hope Haven, an Iowa-based Christian charity that provides services to people with disabilities. “They’re able to get out of the dirt and the mud, down where people don’t want to touch them. All of a sudden they’re in a wheelchair and it just brings them up a couple of notches.”

Among the world’s lame, a wheelchair is often the most tangible difference between the haves and the have-nots. Yet in the United States and many other industrialized nations, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of unused wheelchairs are gathering dust in closets and garages. Thousands each year still wind up in landfills and scrap heaps, Richard said.

Mai Tram Huynh of San Diego remembers seeing old wheelchairs left in the rain outside the residential care facility where she works. The waste “made me want to cry,” said Huynh, a Vietnamese immigrant. She arranged to have used chairs donated to Wheels for Humanity and was recruited to serve as an interpreter.

The crusade to recycle these valuable devices on a global scale is relatively new. One day 11 years ago, Richard came upon a Guatemalan woman dragging herself across a dirt stretch of the Pan American Highway to the garbage heap where she salvaged a living. Richard, working as a missionary, spoke with the woman and promised to bring her a wheelchair.

Back home in the Midwest, Richard placed a notice for wheelchair donations in a spinal cord injury newsletter. He returned to Guatemala with a wheelchair for the woman--and 19 more. These gifts prompted still more requests.

Since then, Richard, 45, has personally established two of the world’s busiest wheelchair charities, as well as a prison program in South Dakota where inmates refurbish old wheelchairs. The two charities Richard founded have distributed more than 13,000 wheelchairs in more than 25 countries--”a drop in the bucket,” he says, of the global need.

Their work has inspired the creation of three other charities that recycle wheelchairs. Often the groups work together. When Mark Richard calls his counterpart at Wheels for Humanity in North Hollywood, he speaks to his brother David.

Four years ago, David Richard, 43, was selling golf course equipment when he joined Mark on a wheelchair delivery to Central America. The emotional rewards were so great that David soon found himself ignoring his sales job and risking bankruptcy as he devoted his days to collecting wheelchairs. He founded Wheels for Humanity under the aegis of his church, First Christian of North Hollywood.

Wheels for Humanity shed its religious affiliation in February 1996 when it secured federal tax-exempt status. The nonprofit agency, which now pays David Richard a $36,000 annual salary as executive director, uses donated warehouse space in North Hollywood for storage and the dining room of David’s Studio City apartment as an office. The group has delivered more than 2,500 wheelchairs to more than 20 countries, including Cambodia, Russia, Ukraine, India and Cuba.

January found the Richard brothers working together again, leading teams of volunteers to Vietnam. Collectively, the teams had 37 members, including three medical doctors, five physical therapists and six returning Vietnamese immigrants who served as interpreters.

Hope Haven’s 23 team members represented a homogenous group of devout Protestant Christians, mostly from the Midwest. The Wheels for Humanity contingent, meanwhile, included a few garden-variety Protestants, three Buddhists, two devotees of a New Age spiritual group, a Catholic and a Seventh-day Adventist, as well as Braverman, who is Jewish. The Hope Haven team included four Vietnam War veterans; Wheels for Humanity’s team included a few veterans of militant anti-war protests.

Everybody involved would come to understand that there is a delicate art to wheelchair diplomacy, especially with regard to Vietnam.

This was particularly true for the Vietnamese who were returning to their homeland. Indeed, long before they arrived in a city they would prefer to call Saigon, Dr. Lien-Huong Nguyen and other Vietnamese participants well knew that the hard-line anti-communists among their fellow refugees regard any interaction with the Hanoi government, even an application for a visa, as collaborating with the enemy. (Two Vietnamese couples from Orange County abruptly canceled plans to participate after criticism appeared in a Little Saigon newspaper.)

In most locales, Vietnamese officials greeted the returning “Viet Kieu” (overseas Vietnamese) and their other visitors warmly in formal ceremonies and later feted them with special dinners. The Viet Kieu and their hosts prudently steered clear of political discussions.

The volunteers came for different reasons. Some Hope Haven members spoke of God calling on them to do such work. The returning Vietnamese spoke of a desire to help the unfortunate in their homeland and see the country’s condition for themselves. Some others, such as physical therapist Rita Snell of Oak Park, making her fifth foreign excursion with Wheels for Humanity, and seating specialist Rob Morgan of Glendale, making his third trip, described it as a particularly interesting and gratifying way to see the world.

Braverman was seeking catharsis. A few years ago, David Richard had dropped by Braverman’s Northridge home to accept the donation of a chair Adam had outgrown. A few months before the Vietnam trip, Braverman began collecting chairs himself. Recalling how much joy the wheelchair with the rainbow design had provided his son, Braverman spoke of it as representing Adam’s spirit. He said he wanted to be sure it would find a good home.

For many of the Americans, the trip provided painful reminders of the war’s legacy. Even now, villagers occasionally step on land mines, and questions abound about the connection between the toxic defoliant Agent Orange and birth defects. The cities bustle with commerce and yet poverty is rampant, health care is primitive.

In a village outside Pleiku, Dr. Kenneth Jones, traveling with a Hope Haven team, was reminded of the unhygienic conditions he encountered in Africa when he established Cameroon’s first leprosy clinic in the 1950s. In Tuy Hoa, Dr. Scott Ecklund was stunned to see scores of polio victims--including several children--so many decades after the vaccine against the disease was perfected.

Arriving in Hue by van, the Wheels for Humanity team was greeted outside a hotel by a beggar whose torso seemed to emerge from the sidewalk. This former soldier for the vanquished south would be among 91 individuals--including 37 war victims, almost half of whom were civilians--who would receive wheelchairs during the next two days. Among the land-mine victims was a young farmer who brought along his 3-year-old son. The boy was nearly as tall as his father.

Rumors of wheelchairs at the Hue clinic brought another man whose legs were amputated well above the knees. He had not filled out an application and waited for hours only to discover that every chair had been taken. After Dr. Nguyen told him that the group would return with more wheelchairs in July, he forlornly hobbled off. Hands that could have rolled a wheelchair instead held wooden blocks. He would place these forward like tiny crutches, then swing ahead the wooden platform that was attached to his pants and protected his stumps from the street.

Vietnamese doctors, hoping to attract charitable support, were eager to show visitors just how meager their resources are. In Danang, the spartan maternity ward lacked not only incubators, but heating and air conditioning. The delivery room lacked the respiratory equipment common in American hospitals--one reason, doctors suggested, that at birth so many children suffer hypoxia, a lack of oxygen to the brain.

Hypoxia is a primary cause of cerebral palsy. But even in modern hospitals, mistakes are made. Adam Braverman was the victim of what is euphemistically called “a difficult birth.”

What doctors understand in clinical terms, Eric Braverman understands as a parent. Your fondest hopes and dreams for your child are suddenly shattered.

“What it is,” Braverman said, “is a death at birth. You grieve . . . And then your whole focus as a parent becomes, how can I make this child happy? How can I ease his pain? . . . Adam was a joy. I miss Adam. I miss his purity. I don’t miss his pain.”

After Adam outgrew his first wheelchair, the Bravermans donated it to Wheels for Humanity. Last year, Eric Braverman took a year’s leave from his work with a technology firm to spend more time with his young daughter Madison, now 3, and the twins, Jonathan and Morgan, who were born three months after Adam’s death. All three children are healthy.

Braverman is a large man with a forceful, irreverent personality whose gentler side showed at a facility in Ho Chi Minh City for disabled children. The painful wails of a small girl with cerebral palsy ended when Braverman held her hand and stroked her stomach. After therapists Rita Snell and Tammie Viehmann fitted another child in a wheelchair, Braverman delighted the boy by wheeling him around the courtyard, much as he used to do with Adam.

Some of these children had been abandoned. But on the groups’ travels through Vietnam, Braverman was impressed by how “people took care of their own. . . .”

“There’s a lot of love. I saw a mother holding her son, who was bigger than her, on her hip. I couldn’t imagine a mother carrying a kid until he’s 17.”

Wheelchairs for severely handicapped children help the parents as much as the children. And for the children, the chairs are not just a source of mobility, but of adventure too.

Adam, who was blind as well as brain damaged, used to smile when his parents would push him around a park in his wheelchair. Sunshine and wind were simple sources of joy. That is why Adam’s father described the wheelchair with the rainbow design as “part of Adam’s spirit.”

And so when Braverman looked into the crowd gathered at the hospital, he wanted to find a good home for Adam’s chair. When Braverman spotted Chau Tom, and his wife, Ha Ngo, and talked to them through an interpreter, he learned that Huu was their only child “so far.”

“They went through the same thing we went through,” Braverman said. “Adam was my only child. It’s the exact situation.”

Exact--except for one important difference.

So Braverman made sure that Adam’s gift would not be caught up in red tape. And that is why, as Danang TV cameras rolled, Adam’s wheelchair became Huu’s wheelchair.