That is What We Do

Although there is no camping or, counselors, or arts and crafts activities, I get this strange impression that I am at summer camp. Don't get me wrong, dear reader, I am very happy here, but it feels slightly odd.

I write from the bowels of the Center for Rehabilitation of the Paralysed (CRP). CRP is in Savar, a quaint townlette 30 minutes to the north of Dhaka in Bangladesh. I've been here for the last 6 days, and has been way to preoccupied to blog. This may be hard to believe for some of you, but I am actually working very hard. I walk in the door to the workshop at 8:30am and stumble back to my room around 6:00pm.

I'm now on a volunteer vacation!

This is what doo-goody, doo-gooders do when they get sick of dooing good at home, I suppose. Like all of the rescue ronnies flooding New York City post 9-11, I just wanna help people, dig? I do like the tsunamni tourists in India and Sri Lanka, or all the annoying christian helpers up in Ma Theresa's joint.

The workshop is the rehabilitation engineering / seating and positioing clinic on the sprawling CRP campus. I am joined by a bevy of technicians an a handful of occupational therapists and engineers. Well, they were here already, I just sit in the corner and stare at the tools and try not to cut myself.

Besides all of the chairs and prosthetics that they are busily constructing, they get to babysit me and my project. Mine is a project of necessity not glamour. While I wanted to get all jiggy with architects and designers, and talk high-fallutin nonsense about universal design, I'm getting jigified with jigs... and shunts too. Me and my dear friend Mister Alamgir (Alum-Ghee) are designing a portable seating and positioning system. I ask him lots of questions about the shop equipment and he scowls.

For wheelchairs, you have two basic seating types: the plain jane and the special seat. Each can be dissected and stratified into niches and needs. The plain jane is for peeps who have lower level spinal cord injuries, amputations or have plenty of upper body muscles to move them around. The special seat user needs help propping their body up.

Special seats in the US are really high-tech wonders. They buzz, jerk, slide, tilt with an efficiency that would make NASA proud. They are constructed of molded plastic and space age fabrics, gels and meshes. Chairs get used hard, because like any piece of durable medical equipment, they become an extension of your body. Western Special seats are designed to clean easy (to shed a user's funk), adjust to the user's bodies needs and whims and be easily transportable. Special seating for people with cerebral palsy and other mobility disabilities, is essential for increasing their independence in life, being productive and getting shit done.

In the developing world, like most things for people with disabilities, wheelchairs are a luxury. If you are born with, or acquire a serious mobilities disability, you'll be lucky if your family doesn't disown or divorce you. Then you'll be super-psyched if you get your hands on a flat board that may or may not have little wheels, like a Michael J Fox skateboard in Back to the Future. For those with a little more luck, you'll be channeled into an organization that will hand you a 1950's everett and jennings style tank-chair that 5 generations of neighbors have died in.

You can see where I'm going with this... Special seating is like the frill of your big-pimpin '64 impala's shaggy ceiling.

At CRP, we design and fabricate new chairs from durable components available locally, we design in plain jane and special seat flavors. People who can make it to our seating clinics are very happy. The chairs we design are efficient, but are not exactly high tech. They utilize rickshaw wheels, and rubber castors and a thick grade of steel tubing. They will hopefully last the user a lifetime of bumps and spills and falls from the top of local busses (from which we guarantee the life of the chair, not the user).

We're working on a portable seating system so that families of children with disabilities can actually bring the seat back to CRP for adjustment and recalibration as they grow. A device that plays such a serious role in a person's life, needs to adjust to their changes. A return trip to CRP is like a kid's journey to Footlocker. To insure correct development of their minds and bodies, they have to come back. But, they have to come back by bus, and buses here (or any mode of personal or public transportation) are not wheelchair friendly. There are plans for satellite seating centers throughout Bangladesh, but there is only one for now.

Along with annoying Alamgir and my boss, Firoz, my job is to make it easier for the caregiver, while keeping the quality and adjustment settings of the chair consistent. We are hoping that if a family can bring just the "guts" of the seating system back, then they will be more likely to return. I'm excited about the accessorizing possibilities, such as handstraps and carrying bags and baseball hats. F and Alamgir and Nehpa our OT, are more worried with other things... like my date of departure. I'm sure that they are all going to celebrate my return to India (then back to home) in a couple more weeks.

Go Pistons.