It was the summer of 1979, and I was 29 years old. Laurie, my wife, and I were excited to spend two weeks exploring Spain. Our adventures led us to a medieval city nestled on the northern tip of Africa’s coast called Tétouan in Morocco.
Tétouan was a city of locals, not tourists. We were walking in the marketplace — a good mixture of all ages, with little kids and older people all coming and going through the onion-shaped archway.
That’s when I saw her.
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She was about 20 feet from us, lying flat on her stomach, belly on the ground, pulling herself across the uneven cobblestones. Her hands were dirty and bloodied, covered with cuts and open blisters. I looked at her feet, which were limp and torn. Her legs dragged behind her body as she clawed her way, inch by inch, to the edge of the street. It took me a few seconds to fully grasp this woman’s misery.
People were spilling around her as she kept her limbs close, trying to avoid being trampled. She was almost invisible to everyone around her.
The crowd was sweeping us down the street, unfazed by the woman’s plight, so we stepped back against a nearby wall. Is anybody going to do anything about this? I wondered. Is everybody just going to ignore her?
"We have to do something," I said to Laurie, trying to keep my voice low so as not to draw the attention of the people hurrying by. She nodded, obviously thinking the same thing. We looked up and down the street, craning our necks to scan the shops nearby, searching for something to buy her, anything with wheels.
People kept rushing past her, avoiding her as if she were somehow defiled. But before we could gather our thoughts and figure out a way to help her, she was gone. The woman had vanished into the crowd.
We returned home. I continued working as a biomedical engineer, focused on raising my daughters and building my company, but the memory of that woman stuck with me.
Many years later, as I walked through our living room past the eyesore of an old antique wheelchair I had collected a few years prior, I suddenly stopped dead in my tracks. My thoughts snapped back to Morocco, to that woman in the marketplace with her bloodied hands and blistered feet.
How many people are there just like her in the world? I wondered. How many people could be lifted up off the ground if they only had a wheelchair?
I began to do some research on wheelchairs sold in the United States. Most looked like they belonged in a hospital, not a home. I wonder if there’s a way to make a wheelchair look more like a living room chair, only with wheels, I thought.
I didn’t know much about how to build a wheelchair. By definition, I knew that I needed two wheels and a chair, at the very minimum. I began sketching out designs for a prototype that would be durable yet lightweight, easy to produce, and affordable to transport. Several materials crossed my mind: steel, metal, and plastic. But for the longest time, I was stuck.
I kept asking myself, What’s the least expensive, most durable chair in the world?
We were approaching the end of lawn-furniture season in California when the answer suddenly came out of the blue.
The white resin lawn chair.
They were all around me, these chairs — scattered across backyards, patios, and pools. They were easy to clean and remarkably inexpensive to buy, especially in the fall.
I was excited at the prospect of designing a wheelchair from a white resin lawn chair. Tinkering in my garage, it wasn’t long before I’d built the first 100 of what we now call "GEN_1" wheelchairs.
In 2001, our humanitarian nonprofit, Free Wheelchair Mission, was born.
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This name, we believed, would best help us communicate to the world our mission and values. We were on a mission to make sure everyone who needed a wheelchair had one. And we wanted to give our wheelchairs away for free. There was never a desire to sell them, even inexpensively.
Over the past two decades, Free Wheelchair Mission has distributed wheelchairs to over 1.3 million people living in 94 countries across five continents. But our work is far from over.
Right now, there are still an estimated 75 million people worldwide who need a wheelchair. Many are forced to live on the ground, or be carried wherever they go, or live in isolation.
The loss of mobility changes everything. But the gift of mobility also changes everything. It transforms not only the lives of people living with disabilities but also their families, caregivers, and whole communities.
That’s why I tell our story in my new book "Miracle Wheels: The Story of a Mission to Bring Mobility to the World," not only to share with you my journey to find purpose but also to encourage you to find purpose in your own journey by helping others in need.
