There’s a neighborhood in Antigua, Guatemala where a pick-up basketball game starts every Friday evening. A handful of locals usually come out to watch. It’s an intense, rough game—sweat, blood, tumbling, no mercy. Part of the intensity comes from this group of co-workers’ blowing off steam after a hard workweek. It’s all the more riveting because all the players are in wheelchairs.
The men, all paraplegics, work for Transitions Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides vocational and health education to Guatemalans with disabilities. Transitions provides employment opportunities through two main enterprises: a print shop and a wheelchair shop. That’s right, a wheelchair shop. The primary business of Transitions is making wheelchairs from scratch. It manufactures off-road wheelchairs, refurbishes other types of chairs, and fits and builds prosthetic devices.
Jennifer Smith, an occupational therapist from Minnesota, recently visited the Transitions headquarters in Antigua. Coming from the state-of-the-art facility of Sister Kenny at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, she was amazed by “how they do so much with so little.” The supplies in their shop were very basic: steel tubing, scraps of vinyl, an industrial sewing machine, and a solitary sketch of a wheelchair design. “I watched as one employee started to sew scraps of material together to make a cover for a foam seat cushion,” says Jennifer. “No measuring, he’d just start sewing.” From these rough outlines, the employees craft sturdy, agile chairs that can navigate the cobblestone streets of Antigua and the steep hillsides of surrounding villages.
