Hi Dave,
Nice to see you here. I have sent you earlier message expressing the gratitude of the physically challenged who have benefited from the mobility devices you brought to our club for distribution. In fact the demand is even more now and we will be glad if you can work around for another consignment soon. K. is in US and I hope he has briefed you about the joy of the beneficiaries. The distribution was also broadcasted on Ghana National Television and it was all David Talbot and Rotary. Thank you soo much for the good gesture. Samuel W. Dear David,
What a joy in my heart to read from you!! Oh thank you so much dear brother David for your email to me.My members are so very happy with the walking sticks and crutches that you gave to them....oh my..oh my...my brother we are really praying for the work of crutches4Africa and am so proud of being part of your work in Kenya. I have lots of pictures that we took when giving the crutches to our disabled church members who are effectively using them and they share great testimonies of how these crutches have greatly supported them in their daily walk. Tomorrow I will send the pictures to your email. We still have a larger number of desperate and needy crippled persons who surely need the walking devices.Oh thank you dear brother David...am so glad the Lord connected us together! Please lets us keep in regularly communications always! Pass my greetings to all our dear friends at Crutches4Africa in America.We are part of you and we so dearly love you David! Warmly, Pastor Gordon I am a Physiotherapist from South Africa and worked with people in extreme poverty, including at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, South Africa's biggest township. I was able to help people who had very little and often not the means to get even the simplest of mobility equipment. I have since lived and worked in England, New Zealand and Australia and in each of these first world countries mobility aids are given out single-patient-use, something that truly shocked me when I first left South Africa. Almost every day I came into contact with someone wanting to give these aids back to be re-used. Each time I said "we can't take these back", it made me think of the dire need for these aids in my home continent of Africa and how life changing each aid would be for someone back home. For many years I have said to myself that I need to get involved and after a bit of research I found C4A - exactly the opportunity I had been looking for!! So after many years of thinking about it, I am finally doing it and have become a collector for C4A.
Emily Coningham I love C4A because it assists the capable but helpless people in the society.
I'm proud to be associated with the idea. Through C4A I have come to see the naked reality of need-based assistance of immobile persons. The bed ridden persons were able to see and breathe the clean air from outside their doors in Homa Bay county. BRAVO TALBOT. I'm looking forward to assisting you again this year. S.L., Homa Bay, Kenya My visit to Nigeria left me in a state of shock because of how inhuame it was to see innocent people suffering from lack of resources. Driving through the villages, the polio epidemic is evident and the reality is seeing kids walkiing on all fours, adults with out legs walking down dirt roads with only their arms. The disabled are ostracized and in addition to living in extreme poverty, they do not have the resources such as canes, crutches and wheelchairs to aid their mobility. After an experience like this, becoming a humanitarian and helping deliver the resources and aid to these villages (that is desperately needed) is a priority now.
- Cynthia Carvajal Last winter, I was rushing down the three flights of stairs and out the door in an ernest attempt to make it to the bus stop. As the door closed behind me, I saw the 54 line pull up to the stop across the street I took a quick step off the curb and onto a slanted patch of ice that somehow had built up on the concrete. My ankle went one way, my knee the other, all my weight on the lovely lateral bulge where your fibula and tibia connect. Torched, twisted, sprained and a slight chip of a bone, landed me the the ER. This isn't a rare event of the citizens of Minnesota in January. I always thought it was pretty cool when people driving motorcycles would wave to other "bikers" on the road when they had no idea who they were, they knew they had some common bond. Now I had my own; crutches and a boot that went up just below the knee. Anyone with a similar predicament got a waive or just a subtle head nod acknowledging how, although not anything enjoyable, we had something in common.
So there is the painful and unpleasant back story to what lead me to find the Crutches For Africa organization. In a small but cozy one bedroom apartment, crutches and a surgical boot are obnoxious. No eBay subsribers or craigslist followers were interested in my used mobility aids regardless of how valuable they are. But the apartment still needed to be de-cluttered. Given the medical bill, it occurred to me that there were no doubt people all over the world who probably couldn't afford or didn't have access to these, but I really had no idea how to go about reaching those people. I decided to just start with google-ing "donating crutches" and second on the list was Crutches For Africa. I was hooked. After an amazing and inspiring conversation with one of the organizations founders, I found myself empowered. I actually had the potential and the means to improve the quality of someone's life. I had the venue to enforce something that the founder and I believe to be a absolute truth; there should be a basic standard of human life and health that we strive to provide as global citizens, one of those elements is the ability to walk. Rachel S. Our two weeks with Dave and Candice Talbot have been a rich and rewarding journey into a world unknown to most Americans. To witness God’s calling to this couple to assist some of the most disadvantaged people on this earth, and to be allowed to participate in their calling has been both an inspiration and a privilege. Their work, however, has not been easy. Packing, distributing, and fitting mobility devices (consisting of crutches, canes, walkers and wheel chairs) in the hot African sun and returning to non-air conditioned rooms without any assurance of hot water, showers, or electricity and avoiding mosquito's as much as possible, is challenging. Consider this a mission, not a vacation. We will never forget the young and old who, when we came were confined to crawling on the ground, but who are now standing on crutches or walkers, or are now transporting themselves in a wheelchair. Yet we will never forget the 46 year old man who was so deformed by polio that his legs which were curled up under him, like useless sticks. He had come for help, but because we had given out all of the wheelchairs that day, we could not help him. We felt such grief as we lifted his body (which probably weighed no more than 75 pounds) back onto the motor scooter and paid the driver to transport him back home. Crutches 4 Africa has given us much more than we have given. The sincere greeting of innocent little children, the “thumbs up” of those given greater mobility, the friendship of those Ugandans with whom we have been working – Julius, Daniel, Paul, his son David, George, Patrick and Pastor Ruth – have more than paid for this experience. It would be difficult to find a mission that has such a profound impact on the lives of disabled individuals as Crutches 4 Africa. As we now head home, our task is to help communicate this impact to our fellow Americans. David & Jeanne McGoldrick 3/21/13 "I have personally witnessed the joy of those who are assisted in improving their mobility..."12/31/2012
I trust that the balance of the trip after Malindi was fine and fruitful. May you be blessed most abundantly for your goodness to humanity, and especially so in Kenya where I have personally witnessed the joy of those who are assisted in improving their mobility and life in general. J., our distribution partner in Kenya You do not always get a chance to meet such a great humanitarian.
D. R., Saco, ME I am amazed at your commitment and concern which is very much inspiring to me and motivated me to see if I can also join hands with you for your most useful and Humanitarian project...
Dr. V., India |