STUDENT LIFE
Wo r t h Ta k i n g
A
BY CHARMAINE LIM
It’s one thing to travel halfway around the world to a new country. It’s another to go because you’re designing a wheelchair prototype for a hospital in Nepal.
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n January 2020, members of the Messiah Collaboratory team went to Green Pastures Hospital in Pokhara, Nepal, to finalize designs of a sustainable wheelchair that could be mass-produced by hospital staff. Under normal conditions, ordering a wheelchair for the hospital could take eight or more months to arrive from India or the UK. Unable to wait this long, the hospital needed something that could be built on site with materials available to them. Leading the trip were Dereck Plante, the engineering projects manager of Collaboratory, and Dr. Timothy Van Dyke, an engineering professor and advisor of the Collaboratory. Plante met the director of International Nepal Fellowship (INF), Thomas Meir, at a conference previously. A conversation about Green Pastures Hospital and the work the Collaboratory could do resulted in Meir inviting Plante to Nepal. In January 2019, Plante and Van Dyke visited Nepal for a week and decided that building wheelchairs was the right project for both parties.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARLIE ADAIR
THE SWINGING BRIDGE
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