THE PERSISTANCE OF DANNY

  Danny Soleta is from the Cavite Province and the city of Rosario. He comes into the Philippine Area Office almost weekly because he is a vendor for items supplied to church houses around the country. He supplies such things as picture frames and the pulpits that rise up and down. He has other items, but those two I could recall. He has recently been released as a Bishop of the Rosario Ward.
  He is now the President of the Rosario Rotary club. He has been trying to schedule a wheelchair training since early August, but due to calamities, the new process we started with Rotary and some 'bad blood' in working with the Rotary club assigned to his District to schedule a training, he kept getting bumped to a new date. Well we said we will train on Nov.15 and 16 and we kept the date.
  He was not discouraged with the set backs and really worked with us to get the location approved and the people invited to attend. Needless to say, his persistence paid off.

 

Danny is on the back row to my right in the blue shirt.

 We had 17 participants come for the training. Many have to travel quite a distance and with the traffic, we never are able to start on time. We hope to start at 8am, by it is generally closer to 9am.

It usually takes a few hours to get to know the people in the group and get a feel of how well they will do. This allows us to make adjustments when we know the abilities of the participants. When we have professionals the teaching progresses faster.

 

 

In the training, we teach how to transfer patients. This is straight forward, but the exercise can sometimes really turn for the worst. It has to do with the men having permission to touch the ladies when we move them. In most cases the ladies prefer to be transferred by other ladies.

 

 

This young lady is the daughter of on of the participants and the meeting house custodian. She is very healthy, but I told her we needed a model to demonstrate how the 'little walker' worked for children.

She is 4 years old and she really enjoyed the spotlight.

 

 

Even though we were only about 85 to 90 miles away from our office, we spent the night

at Mound Sea, a resort near our training. Elder Notarte , with his wife lower right, is taking a picture of Elder and Sister Bautista. The Resort was right on the ocean and had water slides and 3 swimming pools for guests as well as city patrons. The distance may be short, but it is a 3 hour journey through Manila to get here.

 

 

One of our wheelchair recipients was a 14 year old boy that was very excited about his new mode of transportation. Turns out he and his family were also taking the discussions from the missionaries.

He was shy with his chair at first, but within 15 minutes he was spinning it everywhere in the cultural hall of the LDS church that we did our training.

 

 

It may have taken effort to get this training completed, but it was well worth the effort. Another 17 assessors and 17 new friends.