A Trip Worth Taking

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.

BY CHARMAINE LIM

In 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.

"It was exactly God’s plan."

The 2020 Nepal Collaboratory team included three sub-teams: prosthetics, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. The prosthetics team delivered a presentation about 3-D printing and its uses to the hospital’s staff, including some of the head doctors. The small electrical engineering team was a bit of a surprise addition.

“It was very surreal,” senior electrical and computer engineering major TJ Quintilian said. “It was my first time being in a developing country and I had never seen anything like that.”

Quintilian found his way onto the trip after an email to the prosthetics team asked if any seniors wanted to go to Nepal. Even though he didn’t work with the 3-D printing of prosthetics or mechanical engineering, Quintilian knew he wanted to travel during J-Term and took the opportunity.

Because of their training in electrical engineering, Quintilian and Plante worked on the hospital’s solar power system. Their goal was to make solar power more efficient, which required them to change the circuit system to work with a more powerful, 48-volt system. “We were working with German engineers living in Nepal,” Quintilian said. “We’d have Germans speaking English to us, Nepali to other people and German with each other. It was cool to see all the different cultures and work in an environment you wouldn’t find here.”

Responsible for the wheelchair, the mechanical engineering team was able to combine work with a little bit of play.

“Since 50-60% of our work experience was shopping around for materials, I think we got a unique ‘tourist’ experience driving around in taxis and walking down streets that have no names,” Cade Bender, a junior mechanical engineering major, said. “Luckily, our advisor [Van Dyke] still spoke Nepali.”

“I didn’t think the team was as ready as it could have been, going into the trip,” Harrison Crosley, a junior biomedical engineering major and student project manager of the Collaboratory, said. “But it turned out that it was exactly God’s plan. Everything that we wanted to go there for, we completed on the first day. Our questions were answered, we finalized the design right there and by the end of the two weeks, we were bringing home parts to make the wheelchair out of.”

One of the things that helped their design was a four-hour car ride that took them to the house of a man who broke his back after being thrown by a bull.

“His options were to either get on the bumpy bus to get to the hospital or have someone carry him all the way to the hospital,” senior engineering major Carlie Adair said. “Lucky for him, his brother owned some property by the road, so they built him a whole new house by the road.”

Bender, Crosley and Van Dyke fixed the man’s wheelchair, which allowed them to gather ideas for a parking brake in their wheelchair design.

THE RIGHT TO MOBILITY Senior engineering major Cade Bender, left, kneels next to a patient's wheelchair. The chair isn't rugged enough to navigate the rough terrain of Armadi, the patient's Nepali village, meaning he is largely confined to his house. It has been years since the patient, paralyzed from the waist down, has managed the bumpy, hours-long trip to the nearest hospital.

Photography by Carlie Adair

“By the time we left he was smiling…he also was like feeding himself and moving more than when we came,” Adair said. “That was only a small part of that day. It was so long and so crazy and something that I could never forget.”

After returning from Nepal, the mechanical engineering team continued working on the wheelchair’s design. Before leaving campus for Spring Break, they were almost ready to begin building their first prototype. Unfortunately, COVID-19 derailed their plans to have the model done by the end of the spring semester.

The project will continue in the fall of 2020, as Bender and Crosley return to campus and the Collaboratory. In the meantime, the team can focus on fine-tuning aspects of the design that might otherwise be rushed or overlooked. By slowing things down, they can address questions that were brought up during a project review with other engineers.

The whole team at the Shanti Stupa in Pokhara, shortly after a hike through the jungle. The Himalayan Mountains break the skyline in the distance.

Photograph courtesy of Dereck Plante.

Beyond the progress of the wheelchair, it was their experiences in Nepal that left a lasting impression on the team.

“Spiritually, it brought a new dimension to communicating with God,” Bender said. “Even sitting in church, I couldn’t understand a thing because it was all in Nepali. TJ was whispering in my ear because he had a translator. But it was still a church service I felt spiritually led in. I don’t think it mattered — the culture or communication between people.”

“We’re Americans, we live in the land of abundance,” Crosley said. “After going to Nepal and seeing that people are happy with very little, it’s humbling. It put me in a state of thankfulness after coming back. Even taking a shower, I’m reminded of when I showered in Nepal with a bucket. I have a sense of gratitude for being part of that experience and to God for putting me there.”

“In work, it was seeing what they had to go through,” Quintilian said. “A lot of times, we would come up with an idea and the head engineer there would say, ‘We don’t have that here, we can’t do that,’ because they don’t have materials or what we would be used to using in everyday life. They always have to come up with alternatives.”

Quintilian also found a personal connection to the hospital through his grandmother, who visited it when she spent three months in Nepal around 20 years ago.

“When I found out I was going to a hospital in Nepal, we talked about it,” Quintilian said. “I told her I was going to Pokhara and that’s where she lived. I said ‘I’m going to Green Pastures’ and she said ‘I visited that hospital!’ It was very cool to see that even in this big world, sometimes it’s tiny.”

A photograph of a slide taken by Quintilian's grandmother, during her trip to Nepal 20 years prior.

Photograph courtesy of TJ Quintilian.

With personal connections, practical experience and the chance to visit a new country, the journey to Nepal was worth it. Though they experienced the trip differently, there’s no doubt that it left an impact on each member of the team.

“I don’t think there’s anything bad about getting an experience like that,” Bender said.