Rotary to deliver hospital beds and equipment to Leon, Mexico

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When Chris McLucas returns to Leon, Mexico, in December, he will be delivering hospital beds with wheels instead of wheelchairs.

McLucas, working as the international director of the Arlington Sunrise Rotary Club, will be bringing hospital beds and other used hospital equipment to the Red Cross Hospital in Leon in Guanajuato state.

McLucas said he first visited Leon in 2007, while working with the Wheelchair Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to providing a wheelchair to everyone in the world who needs one. The gratitude of those receiving the $150 Chinese-made wheelchairs was overwhelming, said McLucas, 37.

"You would have thought that we were bringing them Bentleys," he said. "One lady, who hugged me and wouldn’t let me go, said that now that she has a wheelchair, it will be the first time in 20 years that she will be able to go to church on her own."

Many of the beds at the Red Cross Hospital have no wheels, so the orderlies must carry the patients to different parts of the hospital to receive X-rays and other services, McLucas said. The hospital’s operating table is ancient, he said. For some views, the stationary X-ray machine currently at the hospital has to be disassembled, McLucas said. A portable X-ray machine is part of the donation. The equipment belonged to Stephens Memorial Hospital in Breckenridge, McLucas said. This summer, Stephens installed new equipment, and temporarily stored the hospital equipment, valued at $175,000, inside a doctor’s office. That office will soon become part of Dr. Goodall’s House and the Graham County Court appointed special advocates office and its Child Advocacy Center, according to Graham County Rotary President, Melinda Lane, 52.

The equipment had to find another home or be moved to a landfill, Rotary officials said. The equipment is at a local warehouse awaiting shipment to Mexico in mid-December, McLucas said. "Rotary already knew of the need because of the wheelchair giveaway," Lane said. "It’s all going to a place in Mexico that has so little. It was a tremendous opportunity for us to be able to give back like that."

Rotary Clubs in the United States and Mexico are major supporters of the Red Cross Hospital in Leon and partners in wheelchair distribution worldwide, said Chris Lewis, Wheelchair Foundation director.

Lewis, son of actor and Muscular Dystrophy Association spokesman Jerry Lewis, said were it not for the Rotarians in the Fort Worth-Arlington area, the hospital would havefew presents under the Christmas tree. "The Red Cross Hospital is there to help the poorest of the poor, the people who have no place else to turn," he said. "There is always a great need, because there are so many poor people there."