The white folks wearing matching white T-shirts were wiping the sweat off their foreheads when a woman, standing out from the sea of white shirts in a red sundress, carried in a 9-year-old Costa Rican quadriplegic girl with cerebral palsy. The young girl, Ambar Esquivel, who cannot walk on her own, was there to meet several therapists and receive a wheelchair made specifically for her.
Robbie Felix, the woman in the red sundress, picked up the mother and daughter in her white SUV and brought them to the site of the weeklong clinic in the retired teachers’ building about 15 minutes outside of Quepos, a port town on the central Pacific coast. They were greeted by 19 volunteers in white Fundación Roberta Felix T-shirts, who completed a thorough evaluation of Ambar through a translator. While the therapist and mother talked, Sara Moore took Ambar’s measurements and began sifting through boxes and suitcases looking for appropriately sized pieces to build a wheelchair.
Moore, who sells wheelchairs for a living in Texas, was on her fourth trip to Costa Rica to help fit children into donated wheelchairs. “I don’t relax very well, so this is a good vacation for me,” Moore said, fanning herself in the thick tropical heat. Moore met Felix, owner of Hotel California, on a previous mission trip. The two women stayed in touch, and Felix invited her to help with the project in Quepos.
“I’ve been selling wheelchairs for 25 years now,” Moore said, “and coming here makes me remember why I do this. These families are so grateful, whereas the families at home just expect this.”
She claims her reasons for coming are not completely selfless. “There is no better feeling than doing something for somebody, and they walk out smiling,” she said. “You should see it. ‘Thank you so much’ and ‘We really appreciate it,’ and they cry, and it’s just great. It’s a great feeling to know you’ve done something good. It makes you sleep well at night.”
On the last day of the clinic, Felix drove all over the area picking up people who had no other way to get to the clinic. “The reason we’re doing this clinic,” Felix said, “is to get all these kids a proper evaluation, and then they can come here on a regular basis to get therapy.”
Felix says because most services are in San José, and some are in Puntarenas (a Pacific port city several hours farther north), living in Quepos is extremely hard on people with health problems. “Mom gets up at the crack of dawn,” Felix said, describing the trials and tribulations she’s heard several times. “She finds someone to take care of the rest of her kids and spends hours traveling and waiting to get one hour of therapy for her kid at a public hospital. So they don’t get therapy. They just don’t get therapy. It’s too difficult.”
That’s why Felix’s foundation is building a therapy center for children and young adults in the area who wouldn’t otherwise have access to care and therapy. The center will officially open on Aug. 6, when one of Felix’s best friends and major donors will be able to attend.
“Otherwise, where are these kids going to go?” she asks with a desperate twinge in her voice. “I mean, seriously, where are they going to go? They can’t even leave the house. If they have a wheelchair, they can’t use it on the sidewalks because the sidewalks have holes in them. They can’t go anywhere downtown because the buildings aren’t accessible. The parents have to carry these kids around, and if they’re too big, what do they do?”
Felix has found 135 cases of handicapped children and young adults in the Manuel Antonio-Quepos area in need of equipment and therapy. In Matapalo alone, a town of 900 people, there were 30 cases. She pointed out that even though the number is large, it may not seem like a problem to the average citizen because “no one ever really knows how many handicapped kids there are here because they just can’t come out of the house.”
In fact, the whole idea started because, unbeknownst to her, Felix had a young handicapped neighbor in need of a wheelchair. A few years ago, a San José-based foundation collecting money to buy a wheelchair for her neighbor knocked on Felix’s door. She donated money and met the boy. “But the wheelchair never materialized, and I knew several other people in Manuel Antonio who were donating to this imaginary wheelchair,” Felix said.
After getting to know the boy’s mother, Felix tried to get a wheelchair for him on her own and began to look for therapy options. “Being an American in Costa Rica and realizing there were no services was shocking. There was nothing, I mean nothing,” Felix said.
The two main goals of the foundation are to help the children help themselves and to give the parents a break in caretaking. “A lot of the kids need 24-hour care,” Felix said. “All parents have children thinking that one day their kid will be self-sufficient. The more the kids can do on their own, the less the parents worry about who’s going to take care of them when they die.”
Gregoria Calderón is a 51-year-old stay-at-home single mother of a 14-year-old daughter with cerebral palsy, Yudy, and six other children. Calderón spends her days at home with her daughter. On good days, Yudy can help wash the dishes or pick up clothes, but Calderón still has to dress her and feed her – when they have food to eat.
“Most of us who are mothers of handicapped children are single mothers, and we’re very poor,” she said. “My son fishes, and that’s the only income that we have. Sometimes the fishing is good, and sometimes it’s bad.”
Another thing Felix would like to do with the foundation is offer full meals to the children at the foundation or donate meals to the families. “These kids need high-calorie meals,” Felix said. “We’re not talking rice and beans. If they don’t eat well or if they don’t eat, that only adds to their problems.”
“Yudy is really smart, and she loves computers,” said her mother. Calderón would like to send her daughter to a school in nearby Parrita with a special room for handicapped children, but she worries about letting Yudy travel on her own. Yudy cannot walk on uneven surfaces, like the gravel road in front of their house. The left side of her body does not cooperate with her brain, and one leg is longer than the other.
“They told me I can send her on the bus (to Parrita), but I would have to take her to the bus every day,” Calderón said. “What if there is no one there to help her off the bus? I just worry too much.”
But Calderón says she has a lot of faith in Felix, and she knows she could send her, worry-free in August, to the school and therapy center Felix is building. “The goal is to get them as much independence as possible,” Felix said. “If they can go to the bathroom on their own or dress themselves or even learn to wash the dishes, then we’ve accomplished something for them and for their parents.”
At the very least, she said, it will be comforting to the parents to know that once or twice a week, they can drop their kids off somewhere they will be safe, well-cared for, and have fun with other people. At the same time, the parents can take that time to do whatever it is they need to do, like get their hair cut or go to the grocery store.
“It’s kind of like having a weekend for people who’ve never had a weekend before,” Felix explained.
