These are real people across Costa Rica whose lives changed the day a wheelchair arrived — each one the hero of their own story, and each chair made possible by someone like you.
After a car accident six years ago, Marisol's world shrank to a borrowed bed in her sister's house. Her custom-fitted chair gave her back the market, the church, and the coffee fields she grew up in.
Born with cerebral palsy, Kevin was carried everywhere by his mother — until he outgrew her arms. His new chair, fitted to his growing frame, meant his first full week of school ever.
A lifetime of ranch work took Don Ramón's knees, and pride kept him housebound rather than be carried. Now he holds court every evening in the plaza — arriving under his own steam.
Multiple sclerosis slowly took Ana Lucía's ability to stand at the sewing machine that fed her family. With a chair fitted for working height, her little alterations business is open again.
A motorcycle crash ended Esteban's construction career at 25. Three years later, a sports-style chair — fitted by volunteers who took his measurements twice — got him back to coaching youth fútbol from the sideline.
Diabetes cost Doña Carmen her leg and, she thought, her place in the kitchen where three generations learned to cook. Her grandchildren now fight over who gets to push her to church on Sundays.
Somewhere in Costa Rica right now, someone is waiting for the chair that changes everything. You can be the reason it arrives.
Donate NowMarisol grew up between the coffee rows of Puriscal, the kind of kid who knew every shortcut between her house and the town square. She was 28, working as a school cook and raising two boys, when the truck she was riding in left the road on a wet mountain curve. She survived. Her spine did not come through whole.
What followed was six years in which her world got very small. Her sister took her in, and the family did what loving families do — but a borrowed bed in a back room is no place to live a life. Costa Rica's public system had a years-long wait for a wheelchair, and a properly fitted one was simply out of reach for the family's budget. Marisol describes those years simply: "My front door was the edge of my world."
A neighbour told the family about a distribution day coming to the region — chairs imported from the United States, refurbished at the warehouse, and fitted one-to-one by trained volunteers. Marisol almost didn't go. "I had been disappointed before," she says.
The fitting took most of the morning. Volunteers measured her hips, her posture, the strength in her arms; they swapped wheels, adjusted the backrest, added a cushion shaped for her. It wasn't a chair off a shelf. It was her chair.
The first place she asked to go was the market. Not the doctor, not even the church — the market. "I wanted to pick out my own tomatoes," she laughs. "Six years of other people's tomatoes."
Today Marisol is back at the school two mornings a week, supervising the kitchen from her chair, and her boys no longer plan their days around who will stay home with Mamá. "The chair didn't give me my legs back," she says. "It gave me my life back. That's better."
Kevin was born with cerebral palsy in a small community outside Limón, the youngest of four. For his first years, his mother Yesenia carried him everywhere — to church, to the clinic, to watch his brothers play fútbol. It worked, the way hard things work when there is no alternative.
Then Kevin grew. By seven he was too heavy to carry the two kilometres to school, and the family's stroller — long past its limits — collapsed for the last time. Kevin's education became a workbook at the kitchen table and whatever his brothers remembered to teach him. He is a bright, funny kid, and he knew exactly what he was missing.
A pediatric wheelchair is a specialized thing: it has to support a child's posture, protect growing joints, and adjust as the child grows. Chairs like that rarely reach rural Limón. When the ministry's team arrived for a distribution day at a church in the city, Yesenia and Kevin were first in line — they had left home before dawn.
The volunteers fitted Kevin into a bright red chair with growing room built in, taught Yesenia how to adjust the supports, and showed Kevin how to work the wheels himself on smooth ground. He mastered that part in about four minutes.
The Monday after, Kevin attended his first full week of school in his life. His teacher moved a desk to make room for the chair, and his classmates argue about who gets to push him up the ramp. He has opinions about all of his classmates now, and shares them at dinner at length.
"He was always watching from the window," Yesenia says. "Now the window is for other people. Kevin is out the door."
Fifty years of ranch work in the Guanacaste heat gave Don Ramón a long memory, strong opinions, and two knees that finally refused. A proud man, he chose four walls over being carried through town by his sons.
At a distribution day hosted by his parish, volunteers fitted him with a sturdy chair built for rough ground. He inspected the welds personally before accepting it — rancher's habit.
Now he rolls himself to the plaza every evening, where he has resumed his life's true work: supervising everyone else's business and being right about the weather. His sons say the town feels normal again.
Ana Lucía's sewing machine paid for two children's schooling over twenty years. When multiple sclerosis made standing at it impossible, the machine went quiet — and so did the household income.
Her chair was fitted with her work in mind: seat height matched to her table, supports that let her sit steady through long seams. The volunteers treated her workday as part of the fitting, not an afterthought.
Her alterations business reopened within the month. The first thing she sewed was a cushion cover — for the chair. "We look after each other now," she says.
At 25, Esteban was laying block by day and playing wing for his barrio team on weekends. A motorcycle crash on the highway home ended both in one afternoon.
The hospital's loaner chair fit him like a borrowed suit — wrong everywhere. Three years later, ministry volunteers fitted him into a light, sports-style chair, measuring twice and adjusting until he could corner on a fútbol pitch.
He now coaches the youth team he once played for. His players have learned two things: how to run a proper drill, and that the coach in the chair will absolutely beat them in a sprint across the court.
Doña Carmen's kitchen taught three generations to cook. When diabetes took her right leg, she assumed it had also taken her place at the stove — and the Sunday walk to church that anchored her week.
Her fitted chair changed the math. The kitchen was rearranged in an afternoon, and the tamales at Christmas were hers again, made from her own two hands with grandchildren under her elbows.
As for Sundays: her grandchildren now negotiate — sometimes loudly — over whose turn it is to push her to church. She pretends to find this tiresome. Nobody believes her.
