From Salem To Costa Rica With 1,650 Wheelchairs

SALEM, MA -- On a recent trip to Costa Rica, Rosaleen Doherty and Celeste Begley with the Salem-based home healthcare service Right at Home Boston-North, would ask the same question of the more than 35 people they distributed wheelchairs to: Now that you can get around, where will you go first?

Most of the recipients said they would go to church. Others wanted to visit a neighbor or relative that lived a few houses away. One man said he was going to take his wife on a date.

"The people we were meeting were literally sitting on the floor of their homes when we arrived," Begley said. "Their stories were heart wrenching, but we were able to help give them independence, mobility and dignity."

Doherty and Begley returned Sunday from a six-day trip to Costa Rica that Omaha, Neb.-based Right at Home ran in conjunction with the Free Wheelchair Mission, a group that distributes wheelchairs to people in need around the world, and the Do It Foundation, the charitable arm of Costa Rica's version of Home Depot. Last year at its national conference, Right at Home raised enough money to purchase 1,650 wheelchairs, and Doherty and Begley were part of a group of 12 that went to Costa Rica to assemble and deliver the first batch.

"We forget how fortunate we are here -- if I were on Medicare I could get one at low or no cost," Doherty said. "But that's not the case for 70 million people in other parts of the world."

Doherty opened Right at Home Boston-North 15 years ago. It was the first Right at Home in Massachusetts and now employs 300 people in offices in Salem, Haverhill and Somerville.

Doherty said the people they met had a wide range of ailments. Many were relatively young people who had lost a limb to diabetes. One was a woman in her late 50s who had contracted polio when she was eight months old and still relied on her mother, now in her eighties, for care. Another was a man whose sister feared she would be unable to move him to safety as floodwaters rose during Hurricane Nate.

Indeed, the women traveled to rural parts of Costa Rica that are not on the typical tourist's itinerary. Each morning they would work on assembling the wheelchairs that would be distributed that day. The chairs were loaded onto trucks that would then travel unpaved and storm-ravaged roads to destinations where there were no road signs and no house numbers. "Its amazing we could even find some of these people," Begley said.

The chairs come in three sizes and each one cost $80. Part of the work was customizing the fit for each recipient, but more importantly, the women said, was taking time to get to know the stories of each recipient. "We not only witnessed the emotion of recipient, but the emotion of family members who care for them," Begley said.

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Photos by Right At Home Boston-North.

Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).