The Village Rehab Project
Ajoya, Mexico

(excerpted from "A Village of Second Chances," San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday Punch, July 1, 1990, by Lonny Shavelson)  
     ...Ajoya is a poor and dusty town in Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains. It's the last place you'd expect to see children racing in wheelchairs to the only wheelchair-accessible school in rural Mexico. And it's strange to walk the rough path to the river and be joined by people on crutches, kids limping along in casts, adults strolling on artificial legs. This backwater town is at the cutting edge of rehabilitation for disabled people in developing countries. 
    It's tempting to say that Ajoya's connections with Stanford University and San Francisco's Shriner's Hospital explain how this happened. But the truth is that the people of Ajoya led the way, while the U.S. organizations watched and learned. ...

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Paralyzed by a gunshot wound at a high school dance,
Martin Peres is now in charge of the wheelchair shop at Ajoya

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        The playground is a splash of color in this mud-brown village, where
white-washed rehab rooms encircle the park. 
At night, the playground fills with able-bodied and disabled
children and adults, dancing on their feet or in wheelchairs --
a carnival gone a bit mad in the fine tradition of the Mexican surrealists.

 

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