Prosthetics and Hope

While IMAHelps is moving quickly to finalize preparations for our upcoming medical missions to the Dominican Republic, IMAHelps will continue to change lives in Ecuador.

In late January, IMAHelps Director Gloria Soto-Reyes, our longtime physical therapist from the Bay Area, and Jeff Crider, our VP and communications director, will travel back to Quito, Ecuador to deliver prosthetic arms and hands for several children and adults who were measured for prosthetic devices by inner city high school robotics students from Cleveland, Ohio who joined our team in Quito last summer.

Crider said the students, who do their robotics work at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, have spent this fall designing and manufacturing mechanical arms and hands for their Ecuadorian patients using 3D printers. The students are supervised by JonDarr V.T. Bradshaw, a retired NASA educator who joined our mission team last summer along with Timothy Hatfield, another robotics mentor.

One of the patients eagerly awaiting Jeff and Gloria’s return to Quito is 27-year-old Jefferson Aguirre, a quadruple amputee who was recently electrocuted while cutting pipe.

Aguirre showed up seeking help on the first day of the IMAHelps mission to Quito last August. Our prosthetist, Robert Openshaw, immediately got to work making Jefferson prosthetic legs, which he tried on after a couple of days. Gloria then worked with Jefferson, teaching him how to steady his balance and walk on his new legs. By the end of our mission, Jefferson was able to walk out of the hospital on his own, with our volunteers and hospital staff members cheering him on, as you can see in Jeff’s video on the left.

But legs weren’t the only gift Aguirre would receive. The robotics team also promised to provide him with mechanical arms and hands, which Jeff and Gloria will deliver to him on their return trip to Quito in January.

“You have given me a reason to live,” Jefferson told us with a big smile and through tears.

There wasn’t a dry eye among us.

We’ll share another update on IMAHelps’ life-changing, collaborative work with the Cleveland robotics team in our next newsletter.