Page 31 - ABILITY Magazine -Cedric Yarbrough Issue

thinking about creating workshops. Ave Maria is slight- ly north and slightly east, which is far away from most of the population, because the capital is southwest and at quite a distance. But this private school will serve that community for now. It is backed by a lot of church funding, so it charges very little, or maybe nothing at all, for people with disabilities to attend, which is very, very uncommon and why we’re trying to start there. They seem equipped to handle everything, and they had the same mindset of inclusion for those in the disability community. We would visit other schools, and they would say, “Oh, yeah, we have a few disabled kids,” and we’d ask, “Okay, how are they able to use the pit latrines?” and they were like, “We don’t have anything.”
Some people make their own walkers or crutches, but that’s dependent on their situation and what they can get their hands on. So we started thinking about a device that incorporates either a walker or a crutch, and we brought a walker designed for the terrain in Uganda. That was one of our three prototypes we took to Uganda in January. We thought, Okay, we have these three pro- totypes, and we’ll ask everybody that we show them to, “Which one would you use?” We thought there would be a unanimous favorite: Everybody says this one, or 80 percent of people like this one.
On the other hand, this school has its own private latrines, including a lawn chair with a hole in it placed over the latrine “for our disabled students.” But that’s one of the only places we’ve seen that, which demonstrates they’re already trying to be inclusive.
That was not the case. It was almost even between the three prototypes. It was dependent on what disability they had and also what technologies were available to them at the time. One woman who had a wheelchair really liked the one that wasn’t a mobility device, because she could just put it on her lap and get there. Other people who had a crutch were like, “I would want the crutch.” Lots of people had prosthetics that couldn’t bend. They were more like balancers or just made it look like they had another leg. They weren’t very functional. Here a prosthetic helps you walk, but those not as much.
Cooper: Scaling and using that as a test site makes some sense.
Hey: Some sense? What do you mean?
Cooper: So it was more for appearances?
Cooper: One of your challenges is that that is a unique environment, as you just said. You found a unique school. So, in a way, you’ve gone there and picked the low-hanging fruit. How are you going to duplicate this model in other parts of the country or world? The bril- liance of this idea is not so much the product, but the training. If you can give these people a skill set, that’s sustainability right there. Since you’re engineers, you should be able to start thinking around this issue. What else can they produce beyond the chair, something the general population wants but costs too much right now? Or maybe they don’t even know they need it.
Hey: It would seem so. One woman had to take off her entire prosthetic before she even tried to get to the pit latrine because she wouldn’t be able to hold it and squat. She would take it off before she left her house to go to the pit latrine, which made it really hard for her to get there. She would usually crawl.
We talked to some students at MIT who were doing something similar with wheelchairs. They created a really cool design that allows a chair to gear up and go over rough terrain. They wanted them to build it on-site, so they looked around and found that they could inte- grate bicycle tires, which made sense. They made this thing out of bicycle parts. It’s a wheelchair but most of the components are from bikes.
Hey: Communal, usually. They have a clan system. You live around the same area as the rest of your clan. Some of them are family members, some are not. It basically makes up a village. In a village, depending on the size, a clan will have a communal pit latrine.
Hey: That’s really cool.
Hey: Because it would get stolen.
Cooper: How did you determine the need?
Hey: Well, if they leave their soap at the latrine, it gets stolen.
Hey: The first prototype we built, we showed to Mar- garet Orech over Skype and asked her what she thought. She said, “Well, it folds up and that’s great, but there’s no way they’re going to get to the latrine holding that.” It’s kind of heavy—
Cooper: Is there water at the latrines?
So then we started thinking about different mobility devices. She told us very few people have wheelchairs.
Hey: It’s like going to a campsite where they have a well right next to the latrines.
Cooper: When you say, “pit latrine,” are they going to a communal one or their own family pit latrine?
Cooper: Wow. Why couldn’t you leave your seat there, at the latrine? Why would you have to take it back and forth?
Cooper: How do you know, have you tested that?
Cooper: Are these similar to outhouses?
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