Volunteers link up to get Luis back on his feet
His small Nicaraguan village doesn't celebrate Mother's Day until May 30, but teenager Luis Wilfredo Torres Ruiz is picking up something in our suburbs this weekend that is sure to make his mom, Amanda, smile.
A right leg.
Born healthy except for a right leg that ended above his knee, Luis first came to the United States just before his sixth birthday. A wonderful charity called Healing The Children (www.healingthechildren.org) brought him to Wisconsin so he could be fitted with a prosthetic leg.
The boy's escort for that 1997 trip was Jeff Degner, a Delta Air Lines passenger-service employee from Barrington who volunteered with the charity.
Luis got his leg, and Degner went on to escort more than 100 children from their home nations to the United States for free health care. Now director of the Illinois/Indiana chapter of Healing the Children (www.htc-il.org), Degner was working on a charity mission last September in Nicaragua when he saw his old friend, Luis.
"He stopped by the office with one leg, a crutch and a smile," Degner recalls. "I recognized him by his smile."
Having outgrown his first prosthetic when he was 8, Luis had spent the rest of his childhood with one leg and "a dream that some day he could come back and get a new leg," says Degner, who immediately started working to make that happen.
Friday, Luis' dream will come true.
"He's a cool kid. He's really a normal 16-year-old kid," says Eric Neufeld, the prosthetist who is fitting Luis with his new leg. "He wants to walk, to play soccer, to do normal things. The big thing for him is freeing up his hands. After being on crutches for … years, this will change his life."
Neufeld works with the orthotics and prosthetics firm of Scheck & Siress (www.scheckandsiress.org), which has offices throughout the area, including Bannockburn, Naperville, Schaumburg and Oakbrook Terrace. But Neufeld also is co-founder of a charity called Range of Motion Project (www.rompglobal.org), which provides limbs and braces to poor people around the world.
"I collect used prosthetics, break them apart and strip them down for parts," explains Neufeld, whose charity freely doles out the rebuilt limbs to people who never could afford the typical $35,000 prosthetic. "We've done 500, but this is the first in the U.S."
Speaking with Luis in Spanish, Neufeld, in conjunction with Dr. Shawn Palmer (an orthopedic surgeon based in Barrington), has done all the measurements and will fit the teen Friday in Bannockburn with a custom-made, "super-durable" leg held on by suction. Meanwhile, Luis has been living with his volunteer hosts -- Pat and Rolf Knauz, and their teenage children, Elizabeth and Katharine, of Northbrook.
"That's why it's a cool story," Neufeld says, noting all the charities and volunteers working in tandem. "There are a ton of people coming together to help take care of this kid."
The volunteers and charity organizers get something out of the deal as well.
"It is such a wonderful feeling just being a little piece of helping somebody get a better life," Degner says. "I view myself as just one link in a virtual chain of love; and it is all the links, working together, that have made a wonderful thing happen for a needy young man."
Somewhere in Nicaragua, a mom is smiling.