‘Walkabout 2009‘ raised $150,000 dollars, which in turn provided wheelchairs to 700 individuals in Haiti who became physically disabled in the January 2010 earthquake. Additionally, The Walkabout Foundation provided the Christopher Reeve Foundation with a $50,000 grant to sponsor Dr. Reggie Edgerton, a leading scientist in the field of paralysis based out of the University of California, Los Angeles. To find out more about Dr. Edgerton’s groundbreaking research, click here.

In order to continue to advance this promising research and provide wheelchairs not only to Haiti but to other countries as well, The Walkabout Foundation will begin its second annual walk next month.

The walk will commence on September 13th in Lucca, Italy and follow a segment of the Via Francigena, an ancient path that led from Canterbury to Rome, for 250 kilometers over seven days. In the heart of Tuscany, the founders, their family, and friends will walk over 30 kilometers each day and finish on September 19th in the village of Radicofani.

See below for a breakdown of the walking itinerary:

1. Monday, September 13: Lucca to Ponte a Cappiano (30.6 km) 
2. Tuesday, Setember 14: Ponte a Cappiano to Gambassi Terme (36.9 km)
3. Wednesday, September 15: Gambassi Terme to Gracciano d’Elsa (32.5 km)
4. Thursday, September 16: Gracciano d’Elsa to Siena (30.5 km)
5. Friday, September 17: Siena to Ponte d’Arbia (29.4 km)
6. Saturday, September 18: Ponte d’Arbia to San Quirico d’Orcia (27.2 km)
7. Sunday, September 19: San Quirico d’Orcia to Radicofani (32.9 km)

If you are interested in learning more about the walk or joining us this year, please contact Carolina at carolina@thewalkaboutfoundation.org. If you would like to learn more about the Via Francigena, please click here.

For thirty years, Whirlwind has focused on producing durable, low-cost and highly functional wheelchairs, which are designed and produced in close collaboration with wheelchair riders in the communities they work in.

Whirlwind’s signature wheelchair, the “rough rider” is the perfect wheelchair for the rough and unpaved terrain of the developing world.

When Ralf first visited Nicaragua in 1980, he saw U.S. style hospital chairs breaking and becoming useless because replacement parts were not available. For riders, a breakdown means that all the benefits of mobility and community participation the chair gives suddenly and indefinitely are taken away.

Today, Whirlwind designs are tested to achieve double the international wheelchair standard for durability. And because the grit of village roads will eventually wear out any chair, Whirlwind chairs use only locally available parts like bicycle wheels and the standard bearings used in the ubiquitous Honda motorcycles. All parts are available nearly everywhere at an affordable cost and can be installed with basic tools.

The best way to understand how to develop products for a specific group of people is to live among them. Whirlwind’s five designers have lived a combined 15 years or more in the environments where the riders live. Some of these countries include: Nicaragua, Uganda, Namibia, Kenya, the Philippines, and Mexico.

This direct experience with the developing world and its unique design requirements are only part of the Whirlwind design secret. As new products are researched and constructed, developing world riders build, test, and send Whirlwind design feedback, as well as their own original ideas which are included in the next “rough rider” model.

The “rough rider” has unique design features:

• -Extra long wheelbase for stability
• -Five different seat widths and three different back heights
• -Rear wheels use bicycle tires for easy replacement or repair
• -Steel frame for strength and local reparability
• -Front caster wheels that do not sink into sand, soil or loose pavement
• -Pressure relief cushions protect riders from pressure sores (design in the public domain)
• -Each chair includes a tire repair kit, a pump and an extensive User Manual)
• -Foldable and light

The rough rider wheelchair is any wheelchair rider’s dream, not only in the developing world, but also in the developed world. Ralf can attest to that as he rides around in his “rough rider” all over San Francisco!

Walkabout donated the 400 chairs to Partners in Health and leveraged off of PIH’s infrastructure and network on the ground in Haiti to travel around the country and personally distribute

wheelchairs to St. Boniface Hospital in Fond des Blancs, Haiti Hospital Appeals in Cap Haitien, Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles, Lambert Sante Clinic in Petion Ville, and Medishare in Port-au-Prince.

Walkabout reached out to those in need one by one and listened to their heartbreaking stories, stories of people’s ceilings and houses crashing down on them and being stuck paralyzed in the earthquake rubble for days.

Wheelchairs were donated to people with different injuries, and of all different ages, including a 10 year-old girl named Neftalie who lives with PIH in Port-au-Prince and a 45 year-old mother of five. Walkabout met a basketball player, a local hero, who had been paralyzed in the earthquake, and a 12 year-old boy, Vladimir, who was spinal cord injured when his bedroom’s ceiling fell on his neck.

The Walkabout Foundation was able to bring back smiles to these individuals’ faces and hope to their lives by providing them with the wheelchairs that they so desperately needed.

Many of the individuals Walkabout met were bedridden prior to the wheelchair donation for lack of a pressure relief cushion and a wheelchair. Today, with their new all-terrain “rough rider” chair, these individuals can venture out again

onto the unpaved roads of Haiti to start rebuilding their country and their own shattered lives. These individuals, who were hopeless and immobilized when we met them, have now regained their mobility, freedom, and independence.

The Walkabout Foundation spent a week in Haiti and was represented there by Carolina Gonzalez Bunster, her parents Rolando and Monica, and her younger brother Diego, a rising sophomore at Georgetown University.

A team of eight individuals from Whirlwind Wheelchair International accompanied Walkabout, including Ralf Hotchkiss who has been a wheelchair rider for over 40 years.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Good Girls

William Norwich Meets Three Young Women Whose Paths Have Led Them To Farflung Locales And To Lives Devoted To Altruism

March, 2010

Along with Sasha Heinz, the wife of Chris Heinz and daughter-in-law of Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Carolina Gonzalez-Bunster, founder of The Walkabout Foundation, former First Daughter Barbara Bush is one of three impressive young women I got to know – or in the case of Barbara, got to know better – in New York recently. All are transcending the traditional merry-go-round of charity balls and cocktail fund-raisers most associated with their social set and instead are coming full gallop to not-for-profit causes dear to their hearts, using every advantage ascribed to their generation, from Facebook to face time with the people they help.

After graduating from Yale in 2004, Bush, 28, worked in the educational-programming department at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in Manhattan. But she had known for years that her passion lay in the area of health, so when in 2008 her sister, Jenna Hager, attended an AIDS conference at the United Nations and met people like then-executive direction of UNAIDS Peter Piot, M.D., FACE AIDS founder Jonny Dorsey, and Google employee and AIDS activist Andrew Bentley, introductions were made. Over a weekend at Hager’s house near Baltimore, the Global Health Corps (ghcorps.org) was created, with Piot serving on the advisory board. Inspired by Teach for America, it seeks to improve the quality of health-care services in countries like Burundi, Malawi, Rwanda, and Tanzania with the help of recent college graduates. “This is the organization I was looking for when I finished college,” says Bush, who left her museum job in the last months of her father’s presidency to quietly focus on GHC.

The organization was launched with a $250,000 grant from Google.org. Bush’s pitch to its board “was the most intimidating feeling I ever felt,” she says. “One of the things we are saying is you don’t need to have medical or nursing experience to help – one of our fellows who was doing distribution for the Gap now is helping to organize the distribution of HIV/AIDS drugs in Zanzibar.” Her enthusiasm prompted me to ask if, by any chance, given her political legacy, this is a lead-up to a run for office? You should have heard the response. Suffice is to say, she answered no.

Nor is Heinz running for office, although she has floated the idea to tease her husband. The Harvard graduate with a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania is currently pursuing her doctorate in developmental psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The 31-year-old, who recently traveled to Nepal with Americans for UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund), has joined forces with Planned Parenthood (plannedparenthood.org), where she is on the board of directors. Her mission is to appeal to women her age to revitalize the membership.

“Anyone can host a salon to raise awareness on an issue they care about,” says Heinz, who hosts “friend-raising” salons at her Tribeca apartment. “Invite a local speaker, or watch a documentary. Why do I devote myself to Planned Parenthood? Every opportunity I have had in my life, including my schooling and being able to marry the person I wanted to marry – all the things women my age take for granted – really comes down to one advantage: I can control my reproductive life.”

On a Sunday afternoon before she returned to her M.B.A. studies in social entrepreneurship at Oxford’s Said Business School (that means an M.B.A. in philanthropy), Gonzalez-Bunster, 26, told me the genesis of The Walkabout Foundation. “In 1994, two weeks after graduating from high school, Luis, the oldest of my four siblings, severed his spinal cord in a car accident. Since then, I’ve wanted to do something for him,” she explains. “I’d graduated from Georgetown, gotten a master’s in comparative politics at the London School of Economics, helped launch the London office of the Clinton Climate Initiative, and then worked in the wealth-management division at Goldman Sachs in Dubai when Lehman Brothers collapsed and everything tumbled.”

The unstable economy proved a “crisatunity” – a crisis but also an opportunity that begets a rallying to action and change. “I stopped. I took stock of my situation. I asked myself, ‘what do I really want to do with my life?’ And I quit my job.” Returning to her family’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut, Gonzalez-Bunster found Luis training for the New York City Marathon, competing in a hand cycle as he had done in 2001. His preparation consisted primarily of swimming up to 140 laps in the family pool each day. As the weather turned cold, she suggested he swim indoors at the local YMCA, only to discover that there was no outdoor ramp or elevator to accommodate a wheelchair. She was galvanized into action: “Instead of joining another organization, I wanted to do something that honored my brother and also something where I didn’t have to spend money to raise money. What could we do? We could go for a walk.”

Last summer, along with her mother, Monica, two younger brothers, plus as many as 50 supporters at times, she walked about 500 miles over four weeks on the mountainous path from Biarritz to Santiago de Compostela, while Luis and their father did a road route on their bicycles, sleeping in a different village every night – and raising awareness about spinal injuries and more than $160,000. (For details about this summer’s walk, visit thewalkaboutfoundation.org). Though the Clinton Foundation, Gonzalez-Bunster had already pledged a great portion of those funds to purchase some 1,000 wheelchairs for people in Haiti. She had been planning a trip this month to finalize the distribution of the wheelchairs, when, in January, the earthquake struck. Within the week, Gonzalez-Bunster and her father traveled from the Dominican Republic, where the family has a home, to Haiti, where she met with Paul Farmer of Partners in Health to organize delivery as quickly as possible.

“I saw people prisoners to their injuries, being pushed in wheelbarrows or supermarket carts.” Mobility, in the form of wheelchairs, “gives them independence and freedom,” both literally and figuratively.

“Natural disasters are the perfect recipe for spinal injuries and the loss of limbs,” she said later, telephoning from the Miami airport as she waited for a connection back to England and her second semester at Said. “I met one doctor who alone had done over 60 amputations in the past 48 hours.”

The opening reception was held on February 28, 2010 at Ghaf Art Gallery in Abu Dhabi and Clara Martinez-Thedy, the Ambassador of the Dominican Republic to the UAE, invited The Walkabout Foundation to screen its video of Haiti at the reception.

A percentage of the proceeds from the sale of the artworks by Ines Tolentino went to The Walkabout Foundation. The exhibition raised over $5,000 for Walkabout.

Thank you Clara for all your support!

Luis and Carolina’s youngest brother Matias has been an avid supporter of Walkabout from the get go. Not only did he join Luis and Carolina on the Camino de Santiago, but he has also launched his own t-shirt initiative to support the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

Matias Gonzalez-Bunster, a 16 year-old sophomore at Brunswick School in Greenwich Connecticut, and his classmate Tommy O’Malley, designed a t-shirt with the word “Haiti” written across the front and a picture of the Haitian flag on the back. Underneath the flag is written, “individually we are one drop, together we are an ocean” in 15 different languages, including Creole.

Matias and Tommy had 1,000 t-shirts made and have been selling each t-shirt for $20 everywhere they can. With a small stand and a stack of shirts, they are selling on Greenwich Avenue, in Casa de Campo, Dominican Republic, at their community service day at Brunswick School and Greenwich Academy, and at a street fair in Brooklyn, New York.

Not only have they caused a sensation with their trendy t-shirts, but they have also managed to raise a very significant contribution for The Walkabout Foundation.

Thank you Mati and Tommy for all your hard work!

Please help the victims of the earthquake regain their mobility, freedom, and independence by donating a wheelchair today.

The wheelchairs cost $220 each. They are light, foldable, durable, with all-terrain wheels, and are manufactured in the developing world for the developing world. To those who urgently need one, a wheelchair is a symbol, a sign marking a new start, one filled with hope for a better life.

Your generous donation is very much appreciated, and 100 percent of your contribution will go directly towards purchasing the wheelchairs, which will be distributed directly to those adults and children who are most in need. Simply click on the “Donate” button below to make a contribution towards purchasing wheelchairs for Haiti today.

If you would like to send a check instead, please make the check payable to “The Walkabout Foundation” and send it to one of the two addresses listed on our Contact Us page.

Inaugurating a wheelchair accessible path around the natural wonder of the world, Luis was able to take part in this unbelievable experience thanks to The Walking Connection.

There is a walk, hike or wheelchair accessible adventure to suit everyone. The Walking Connection has developed a special training program that helped prepare Luis and other Team Reeve participants to meet the personal challenges of one of several levels of adventures at the Grand Canyon. His small group was led by The Walking Connection’s Canyon experts who interpreted the intricacies of the geology, history, flora, fauna and environmental zones of the canyon.

Here are a few of Luis’ remarks:

“Ya the trip was awesome. We were a small group only three in wheelchairs, one woman in her mid 40’s who was in incredible shape, a man also about the same age but did not have the full use of his hands, his arms were fine but not his fingers. He was a bit over weight, but he had strong arms. Both were so friendly and nice. The rest of the group was family, friends and some others who were there to do an epic event and donate to a worthwhile cause.

We arrived in Phoenix on Thursday and spent the night in a nearby hotel. The following morning we woke up early and met everyone, and in two vans hit the road on our way to the Grand Canyon. We had to cover about 250 miles or so. We stopped in a very beautiful town called Sedona for lunch. It is one of the most beautiful towns in all of the USA. After lunch we continued to the Canyon arriving around 3 pm. We got our first glimpse of the Canyon, toured the area a bit and wow, it’s so impressive.

The following day, the day of the actual hike, we started early again. We were on the starting point for our walk along the southern rim of the Canyon by 8:30-9:00 am. It was cool but perfectly sunny and no humidity, low 60’s so perfect for me. We were put in different groups. I was with our tour guide Sheldon and the other people in wheelchairs with their family, friends etc. Manuel was with me. The walk from start to finish along the rim is 4.5 miles and so we headed off. Around noon we stopped by some benches and had lunch, with the view of the Canyon in front of us. The walk was a mix of ups and downs. All in all it was quite a workout.

When we reached the end, we decided to turn around and walk, or in our case push, back to where we started. By this time we were now heading west along the rim so the sun was setting in front of us. Along the way we stopped and there are areas where there are no fences so you can get right up to the edge of the cliff and look all the way down, a drop of over a kilometer straight down. That really got the adrenaline going.

When we got back to where we started we decided to keep going. In total we did almost 12 miles. My arms were burning. So much more to the story. I’ll tell you more in the next installment.”

For more information on The Walking Connection, please click here.

For more information on Team Reeve, please click here.