Wheaton gives playground to Haiti
The playground equipment that was in Wheaton Park District’s Northside Park until June has found a new home — in a new country.
The park district teamed up last year with Kids Around the World, an organization that installs play equipment for children living in places devastated by war, natural disasters or political tensions, to send the equipment to Haiti, where it will be reassembled in the coming months.
In three periods between now and March, volunteers in Haiti will install the Northside Park playground and equipment from 38 others from across the United States. The volunteers include helpers from Compassion International, a Christian child advocacy ministry.
Wheaton’s playground was divided into four units that will be placed outside four different churches in the Caribbean nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
Diana Hamachek, playground assistant for Kids Around the World, said the organization, which was established in 1994, finds its efforts help both the people donating the equipment and those living in the more than 20 countries they serve.
“It’s a win-win situation for everyone, not only for the environment, but for the children around the world who aren’t able to afford a new playground that is manufactured here in the U.S. or a different country,” she said. “It’s giving them an outlet to be a child.”
Steve Hinchee, Wheaton Park District’s planner, said the district has been interested in doing something like this in the past because its policy is to replace old playgrounds around every 17 years.
But officials didn’t feel comfortable doing it until they discovered Kids Around the World.
“Because of liability, you don’t want to just take your playground apart and just give it to anyone because it really needs to be evaluated, and that’s what this organization does,” he said. “They actually took the playground from Northside and evaluated what pieces were still useful. We felt much more comfortable using them.”
The playground was brought to one of Kids Around the World’s warehouses in Rockford, where it was packed in a container with 19 of the other 38 playgrounds that were shipped to Haiti.
Hinchee said the old Northside Park playground was replaced by a new set of equipment in October, which includes a 90-foot long zip line.
After the playgrounds are refurbished and reinstalled by volunteers, certified playground safety inspectors examine each set and make sure it meets the safety standards of the foreign countries where they are placed, Hamachek said. They are often set up outside churches, like Northside’s, or near orphanages and tent cities.
Hamachek said there is an extreme difference in how much use play equipment will get in places like Haiti compared to what it does in the United States.
“A playground in another country, after just one year, you would not believe the wear and tear because so many children use it so often,” she said. “It’s an extreme privilege for them, and they use it daily.”
While Hinchee agreed with Hamachek that donating the playground was helpful for the children aboard, he said the impact the donation will have here is more noticeable on the environment.
“We want to be as green as we can here at the park district, and part of being environmentally responsible, I think, is reusing where we can in addition to recycling,” he said.
“If there’s someone who can use the pieces (of the playground) and put them back together and evaluate what’s usable, then certainly it’s something we’re interested in participating in.”