Speaker Meeting - The Wheelchair Foundation

Maggots to Butterflies

The Rotary Club of Hastings is planning to send a container of wheelchairs to Uganda. The Hastings club is aiming to raise £7,000 in donations and by using the Rotary Foundation Global Grant scheme these donations can effectively be trebled for a range of humanitarian causes. Milton Frary Trustee Chairman of the Wheelchair Foundation addressed last week's meeting of the club explaining that to date over 27,000 wheelchairs have been funded by the charity to 24 countries since 2004 often with Rotarians and donor volunteers participating in the handover of this aid. Milton said that he never failed to be moved by the smiles of people who up to then had been confined to their homes or spent their life crawling round on the ground. His most memorable experience was an elderly lady who beamed and said "yesterday I was a maggot crawling on the ground today I am a butterfly". Rotarian Ray Dixon International chairman said the club's aim is to send a small team with the container with specialities including physiotherapy, wheelchair maintenance, general access, training, etc this will ensure the sustainability of the aid effort and make a measurable difference to the recipients lives. Hastings residents can get involved by making donations at the clubs web site www.hastings.rotaryweb.org   and by supporting the Yorkshire Tea "bar code scheme" simply collect the bar code from any Yorkshire Tea product and send it to the Wheelchair Foundation UK, PO Box 658, Wetherby, LS22 9AD. A bag of 80 tea bags will generate a donation of 10p and only 75:00 is required to buy and deliver these sturdy all terrain wheelchair.

rd 8-10-12