Mission Office collaboration with Columbia nonprofit brings mobility carts to Fr. Ussher’s diocese in Ghana
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“God raises the needy from the dust, lifts the poor from the ash heap.”
— Psalm 113:7
The man with shoes on his hands and callouses on his knees looked like he was dreaming.
He gazed intently as Father Henry Ussher and Jake Seifert assembled a new future for him.
“He was staring the whole time, thinking about how his life was about to change,” said Mr. Seifert, senior diocesan director of development and missions.
The 50- to 60-year-old man, who is paralyzed from the waist down and had been crawling in the dust his entire life, received the first of over 100 arm-powered mobility carts shipped this fall to the Diocese of Wiawso, Ghana, through collaboration between the diocesan Missions Office (diojeffcity.org/missions); Mobility Worldwide (giftofmobility.org), headquartered in Columbia; Fr. Ussher’s parishes; and Songbird Station of Columbia.
“I don’t think he even blinked except for the tears flowing down,” said Mr. Seifert. “He just smiled, knowing he was going to be able to go around town without hobbling.”
The Missions Office made a donation to Mobility Worldwide, a local nonprofit that builds the carts and provides them free of charge. Money for the donation came from the diocese’s special Missions Collection, taken up each year in July, and through contributions to the missions throughout the year.
Mel Toellner, owner of Songbird Station in Columbia, allowed the carts bound for Ghana to be stored for three months in his warehouse in Mexico. His employees loaded them into a shipping container to be sent to Ghana.
“We couldn’t have done any of this without them,” said Mr. Seifert. “Without everyone’s financial help, prayers, three months of storage in a warehouse, this never would have happened.”
The Missions Office often works in partnership with overseas dioceses that send missionary priests to serve here.
Fr. Ussher, a missionary priest from the Wiawso diocese (cdwiawso.org), is serving as pastor of St. Clement Parish in St. Clement, St. Joseph Parish in Louisiana and the Mission of Mary, Queen of Peace, in Clarksville.
Lifted up
Mr. Seifert first noticed the need for mobility assistance five years ago while visiting the Archdiocese of Kampala in Uganda.
“My first time there, I saw people who were crawling on the ground because their legs didn’t work,” he recalled. “Here in the United States, if you have that kind of disability, you take for granted you’ll have access to a wheelchair or crutches.”
Back home, he started researching ways to help. He found out about Mobility Worldwide, a registered nonprofit agency that builds simple, easy-to-ship-and-maintain, arm-powered vehicles to ship to people who need them in countries with developing economies.
It is staffed by volunteers who produce hundreds of carts each year.
Mr. Seifert learned from Fr. Ussher about the need for such equipment in his home diocese in Ghana, a nation located on the West Coast of Africa, near the Equator.
The Wiawso diocese is a rural community where about 70 percent of the people are peasant farmers. The area is about a 10-hour drive from a major city.
Cultivating the land without heavy equipment is difficult. The main cash crop is cocoa, which is slowly recovering after being hit in recent years by a deadly blight.
Even in good times, many of the people live in acute, generational poverty, with limited access to healthcare.
Mobility Worldwide agreed to donate about $45,000 worth of scooters, each costing about $425. Mr. Toellner took care of the storage. The Mission Office paid to ship the carts and the import duties when they arrived in Ghana.
Fr. Ussher and Mr. Seifert traveled to Ghana in late October to oversee the carts’ arrival.
“The container arrived at the diocese, and we were able to take the first cart to the Cathedral in Wiawso and put it together,” said Mr. Seifert.
Bishop Samuel Nkuah-Boateng of Wiawso then presented the cart to the man who had gazed in awe at it being put together.
With joyful tears, the man quickly got the hang of pedaling and steering the cart with his hands.
The cart includes a storage bin, so the man can fill it with cold drinks to sell in the marketplace, which will supplement his income.
Face-to-face
People in the Wiawso diocese unloaded the shipping container and loaded the carts onto trucks. A man who services motorbikes helped put some of the carts together.
“It literally took a village to do all of this,” said Mr. Seifert.
He later found out that students at Our Lady of Lourdes Interparish School in Columbia have been holding fundraisers for Mobility Worldwide and decorating carts for shipment for years.
“And now, it’s come full circle,” he said.
Mr. Seifert held back tears while thinking about how something so simple and relatively inexpensive can change so many lives, so profoundly.
“When you go to a place like this, you see real faces and meet real individuals and shake their hand, and it makes it more of a human connection,” he said. “It’s one thing to write a check, but when you see them actually distribute stuff and how it changes people’s life, it puts your own life into perspective.
“You come home a changed person,” he said. “You stop complaining about the little things when you realize your standard of living is above about 99 percent of the world.”
At the end of that first day in Ghana, Mr. Seifert said to God: “Thank you for all the people who gave the money and helped out so that we could do this.”
“People are brought together for a reason,” he stated. “It took a whole team of people — the ones who made a financial donation large or small, those who offered free storage, the people who held us up in prayer, the people who designed and built the carts, the ones who put the carts together, the priests who come here from faraway to minister to us every day — it’s all of these people who make it happen.”
He said an ongoing goal is to raise enough money to distribute carts to other diocese that have mission partnerships with the Jefferson City diocese.
