One man’s thirty year-old dream to build a wheelchair suitable for the road and tracks is finally coming to fruition. 

Nearly 30 years ago, when Colin and Christine Molyneux were working in northern Kenya they lived on the floor of the Great Rift Valley. There they made friends with Pastor Joel who lived half-way up the escarpment. Joel was a paraplegic and although he had a conventional wheelchair, he was unable to use it owing to the steep and stony terrain. It was this that first brought the idea of an all-terrain or off-road wheelchair to Colin’s mind. “I wanted to develop something which would be more useful to him, and the result was the original machine, a self-propelled, three-wheeler, which actually helped him a great deal in his pastoral work.”

Fast-forward two decades. Colin is speaking with Georgie Orme. Georgie, a nurse from Scotland, had set up the Africa Inland Church Child-Care Centre in Kajiado, about 75 miles south of Nairobi. Georgie described the difficulty that many of the children faced because conventional wheelchairs could not travel across the unpaved paths without the assistance of a strong able-bodied helper. These children then faced further isolation in a society that regarded disability as a matter of family shame.

LO-TECH

An Internet search for off-road wheelchairs, will lead you to examples of wonderful and inventive hi-tech feats of engineering, but many are expensive and designed for extreme sports or for speed. Colin needed to come up with something that was sturdy, collapsible, and made from locally obtainable materials and has been working on several designs. This summer he went out the Kajiado to build two distinct prototypes.

Colin describes some of the engineering challenges, “The main driving wheels must be taller and the tyres wider, to allow the wheelchair to travel easily over rough or soft ground. For the same reason, the other two wheels also need to be larger than those on a conventional wheelchair. This gives more of what I call ‘flotation’ so the chair is less likely to sink in soft ground. We also need to make the chassis very strong, as uneven ground means that the chair might be at angles that put great stress on the structure and joints.”

Colin’s trip during the summer when he worked with Daniel who heads up the Child Care Centre, got them to the stage where they built models 1 and 2. Since then he has been busy in his garage to come up with model 3.

Cannibalising two mountain bikes has provided Colin with the materials he needs to create the prototype. The mountain bikes also provide the chain drive system, enabling the chairs to be powered by hand. “We wanted to move away from the user having to drive the chair by gripping the usual wheel rim,” says Colin, “Off-road means just that, paths become muddy and there are streams that need to be crossed. It is difficult to maintain grip on the handrails when they are wet or muddy!”

The dream is that these chairs will be built for the children at the two Centres in Kenya (a second Centre was founded on the shores of Lake Baringo about 200 miles north of Nairobi). At these centres, children with hereditary or accident-caused disabilities receive corrective surgery, prosthetic limbs and physiotherapy, in an environment of Christian love and care of body, mind and spirit.

We believe that, as with Pastor Joel almost 30 years ago, many of these children and teenagers will enjoy a new degree of mobility and self-reliance which will open up great new possibilities for their future lives and ministries for the Lord.

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