This one is kind of a long one, but it’s a good one. So not every Cadet gets to do some cool Army training each summer. Until a Cadet is contracted they aren’t eligible for things like CULP and Air Assault school. Cadet Lieber is a three year scholarship winner, so the Summer after his freshman year he still wasn’t contracted. Along with helping me, as a junior counselor at New York Boy’s State he also did some incredible work in Central America. Here’s his story about his adventure.
Climbing up a steep winding mountain trail, we took turns carrying a wheel chair and getting sips of water to keep us going in the heat of the Guatemalan jungle. As we came out over a vista between the dense walls of vegetation I looked out over the ever expanding green oasis that ebbed and flowed beneath us. I started thinking about how the family we were going to see got to be in the midst of this every single day. Then my thoughts shifted to the mother carrying her son on her back up this trail with his spastic flailing that was surprisingly strong. We kept pushing up until we reached their small home on the top of the mountain. It was a very rugged combination of concrete, tin roofing and whatever scraps were lying around. As we stepped on the porch, there was Carlitos and his mother waiting for us to arrive.
Darlene, the first patient to receive a made in Guatemala stander, was not expected to be able to stand or walk. Two years after beginning using our stander this is her standing next to her now unnecessary standing frame with her mother and part of our 2017 team.
Rewind a few months and I was a 17 year old high school student who hadn’t been out the U.S. before and certainly didn’t know anything about treating cerebral palsy(CP). One day my engineering teacher gave me a number and told me to call it so I did and Scott Mitchell was on the other end. Scott was a biomedical engineering student at Dartmouth University and had designed something that was about to change thousands of lives. He had designed a pediatric standing frame for a school project aimed towards providing physical therapy to children with debilitating diseases. The primary one in mind was CP, which affects 1 out of every 1,000 kids globally to the point where they are unable to walk or control most of their muscle functions. In developed countries there are lots of amenities and safety nets that help to not only prevent CP, but also treat it when it occurs. Standing frames are the most common physical therapy treatment for CP. These “standers” as we call them are devices that provide support to the patient by some arrangement of straps and a frame that allow the child to stand upright and bear their own weight, a near impossible task for many patients. As simple as this may sound a stander on the market today can cost in the range of $8,000 not to mention the cost of a session with physical therapists that you should have multiple times a week. If a part on one of these standers breaks, they could be rendered useless or at least dangerous until it’s replaced, which could quite well be never in many rural developing countries. Scott’s design had all of this in mind. Our stander was made from universally available hardware store materials, is extremely simple to use and repair and costs only $50 to produce.
Our 2015 teams visits a patient in their home in rural Guatemala.
In the summer of 2015 I joined Scott on his approximately two month maiden voyage of the non-profit organization called Stand With Me, now the official name of our group aimed at getting these standers out in the world. Our mission was to travel through Central and South America to check on patients who had received standers already and establish a shop that could produce them in country and get them where they needed to go. When we arrived in Xenacoj, Guatemala we stayed in a small compound next to where our shop was to be established. We were piggy backing of Hope Haven and using part of their facility where they had an established shop similar to ours building wheel chairs. I worked with most of the workers there to make the various jigs and parts that were needed to streamline the construction of our standers and it was an incredible experience to get to work with people who were so different from me. I loved talking to them about their different cultures and learning Spanish in a massive trial by fire brought plenty of laughs. Many of them are in wheel chairs themselves and they took no mercy on the gringos during the lunch break wheel chair basketball games. Within a week or two we had what was a mostly finalized shop other than the changes that would come as we refined the process. The worker that we were hiring to be in our shop once we left was named Kevin and we taught him all that we could about our standing frames and how to make him so by the time we finished the shop our first few standing frames had already been made as practice.
The next phase was to get out and check on our patients who had already received standing frames when they were sent down. This is when the trip really began to get personal. No longer was this just another wood working project, we were seeing the faces and hearing the words of the people we were helping. For many of them we traveled hours by car and walked down trails to find their homes situated in their own corner of the world. We were living out of our van for a couple weeks to see as many as we could. Sometimes all their home would be is a series of wood posts or branches supporting a corrugated roof with cloth dividers for rooms and when we walked in the first thing every family did was offer us a drink or meal. This was more than humbling. If these people had nothing, they would still offer it to us because that’s the way their culture is. I learned a lot in every sense of the word by visiting our patients.
Part of our 2017 team pulling a late night to test design improvements on our standing frame.
One of our patients, Edison, and his family were Mayan and not only did they speak a Mayan dialect rather than Spanish, but they had a totally separate frame of mind than us. They believed that Edison’s ailments were due to witchcraft gone wrong and that prayers and more witchcraft were the only ways to make him better. This was a first for me. I knew these cultures still existed, but interacting with them was unchartered territory for me. After speaking with them for a while they agreed to try our stander since their methods hadn’t been working. We saw a handful more families many of whom praised us as angels who saved them and their child because since using our stander their child started to be able to feed themselves or focus on an object or even walk a little with their mom’s support. I didn’t think I could be anyone’s hero at 17 years old and I still didn’t really feel like I was, but what we were doing was making a world of difference in the lives of our patients and there families.
This past summer I returned to Guatemala and got to see the entire process after two years of functioning. The standers had changed some, the construction process and distribution was being revised and most importantly many of our patients were getting better. We now have over 600 standing frames with patients in 8 countries on 4 continents and have plans to put a shop and distribution center in the western hemisphere in the near future to increase our production. Getting to take part in this was not only emotionally fulfilling, but I was able to learn a lot that I can apply to my role as an army officer. Starting an organization where our primary area of operation is in a foreign country speaking a foreign language and our responsibility includes organizing efforts on the other side of the world taught me a lot about organizational leadership. We spent a lot of time planning and then during our trip changes had to be made and accounted for constantly due to things like cultural differences, different resources being available in U.S. that weren’t there and timing of different phases. Getting this opportunity to go into a real world situation and make a difference from the time that I was 17 to now and knowing that what I and the rest of this team did is going to have impacts on people’s live years from now is extremely fulfilling. I proved to myself that I am capable of creating change and doing good and I think that is going to carry over into not only my Army career, but the rest of my life.
For more info on Stand With Me and our efforts check out www.Standwithme.org!
We expect Cadet Lieber to have more amazing stories after this summer…stay tuned.
Filed under: Army ROTC Information, GKB Cadet Profiles | Tagged: Army ROTC, cadet command, Cerebral Palsy, Clarkson Army ROTC, Clarkson University, Guatemala, Stand with me | Leave a comment »
This summer I spent three weeks in Nepal as part of the ROTC Cultural Understanding and Language Proficiency program. For those who don’t know, Nepal is a small landlocked country in between China and India, which means it has a lot of strategic significance. Just two years ago Nepal was devastated by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, so I was excited and concerned to see the poorest Asian country after two years of reconstruction.
Our last week was our culture week where we acted as tourists seeing the different temples and historical sites in Kathmandu. We saw Hindu and Buddhist temples, ancient palaces, and spent a day on an eight-mile hike. It was a great way to end our trip and experience every aspect of the Kathmandu valley. I learned so much about Nepali history and culture and met a great group of cadets and Nepali people who I will never forget. I hope to one-day return and see the parts of Nepal I did not get to experience. CULP is a great experience and I highly recommend it to anyone considering applying for it.
Upon arriving to CULP, we learned that our mission was to teach English at a local private school, Jetegemee, for young children whose parents either served in the military or were government officials. We began to plan fun games and English lessons that would suite this age group. When we arrived, we realized that we were extremely under prepared and all of our prior assumptions had been wrong. We walked into a class of 19-20 year olds learning advanced chemistry and courses of the same difficulty who spoke proper English. We quickly had to adjust our lessons and began to compare our two cultures. Talking to students around the same age as us and comparing the United States to Tanzania was the most beneficial part of our mission to understand their culture. We compared politics, gender roles, government structures, military structures, foreign trade partners, imported good and exported goods, music, food, sports, the list goes on. We sat in on some of their classes and realized that some of their high school equivalent courses were the same as our college courses and they were taught in Swahili and English. At that point, realizing that we may not have anything we can teach them to maintain the professor’s lesson plan, we divided into groups consisting of cadets with similar majors and sat in on classes that resembled our majors to assist the professors. Toward the end of our mission, the United States Charge d’Affaires, Inmi Patterson, came to visit the school. We saw her interact with the head of education at Jetegemee and the professors and learned about her role as a representative of the United States. Jetegemee greeted her with a song and a dance, representing their culture and how they welcome others.
Outside of the classroom, we experienced the Tanzanian culture through markets, museums, food, a safari, visiting a deserted island, visiting Dar Es Salaam University, and had presentations on Ramadhan and the Massai Tribe. This is where I learned the most. We met locals and experienced their everyday life from working at their markets where they made everything inside, to learning about the library and the pride behind it at the university. We observed how people would wake up early and start selling their goods on the side of the street as traffic accumulated or how fisherman would leave on their boats at dawn and return only once they have caught enough fish for the day. We’d observe locals that have great pride in their nation and sweep the streets to keep it clean and they would describe success as a collective effort, not an individual effort.
The Cultural Understanding and Language Proficiency is by far one of the most rewarding and humbling opportunities ROTC has to offer. Being able to confidently walk into a room with fifty to sixty people of a different culture and start up a conversation is not something that I was comfortable with doing at all prior to the Tanzania mission. Toward the last week of the mission, I was extremely comfortable in doing so while greeitng them in a different language (Swahili). My first days walking around the markets or driving down the streets I was nervous and a little uneasy, but toward the end I was comfortable and it felt normal to drive to school and walk around. Having someone hold my hand after a hand shake or put their arm around me was not something I liked during the first week, but at the end I was holding hands and putting my arm around someone I was talking to. Once I understood the differences between their norms, values and culture, it was easy to embrace the Tanzanian culture and find things in common to talk about. Having not gone on a CULP mission, I would find it very hard to embrace and understand other cultures especially if I was deploying. Now that I understand how different cultures can be and how to find the common ground between two cultures, I can confidently lead my future troops into an unknown area with the experience and knowledge I collected on my CULP mission to Tanzania.
When I applied for a CULP slot, I didn’t know what I was getting in to. I was told that if I was selected that I would be sent overseas for a laid back and relaxing trip, and that I would have experiences and make memories to last a lifetime. Arriving to Fort Knox was a shock. Everything we did was strictly regimented, far from the laid back idea that was falsely placed in my mind. Even though the days were long and hot, I was pleasantly surprised to be placed in barracks with a bunch of other cadets that I didn’t know. It pushed me to reach out and gave me the opportunity to learn from others, as every battalion across the nation brings different ideas and concepts to the table. Learning from them and my Cadre continued throughout the entire trip. In simply making conversation with them, I learned so much about the Army, everything from common courtesies to career paths I may take in the future.
