Ronal has music now.

That’s important. He’s 15, and when a guy like Ronal has work to do, it’s good to have some music in the air.

The music didn’t come from Vine, at least not directly. But you are responsible for what’s carrying the music around. Without Ronal’s PET cart, his construction projects would be quiet, solitary, and much less cheery.

When I met him he was home alone, digging post holes outside his house. He was sitting down, ramming the sharp end of a 6-foot piece of rebar with into the dirt in front of him. When the hole was deep enough, he would lift a 4x4 into the hole, and he or maybe someone else would nail old roofing sheets onto it, making a kind of fence. Then he would start the next hole.

I wasn’t going to ask why he was on the ground, but it was the first thing he brought up, as if the whole thing was a kind of surprise.

“I could walk around fine until I started gaining weight. Then I had to crawl. So…” and he smiled.

A few minutes later a man called Don Lalo took me aside and said he’d watched it all happen, and that Ronal had explained it like a teenage boy probably would, which is to say not very clearly.

Ronal, Don Lalo told me, was a healthy baby born into a tough situation. He was not taken to be vaccinated, and an early sickness left him with something that looks a lot like Post-Polio Syndrome.

“He got around OK when he was little,” Lalo said. “Dragged that one leg but it didn’t slow him down a whole lot. I’d lift him and his brother up into the cab and they’d make the rounds with me. They’re both good workers. I’m training his brother to be a driver.”

Most of our partners are doctors,

nurses, disability specialists, or they’re working in some direct way to provide health care to people who have no other way to get it. Lalo does not fit the profile. He drives a truck. He’s got the cowboy hat, the big belt buckle, the boots, and the pressed oxford shirt to look the part of a man who sees a lot more places than just this neighborhood of shacks scattered outside of town. Lalo is not on our list of partners, and we we would never have gone looking for him. But he passes by Ronal’s neighborhood every week, and when he thought the boy needed help, Lalo found us.

Specifically, he found Nacho, who has volunteered in Vine’s warehouse in Guatemala for fifteen years and who now helps direct our distribution. Nacho met Ronal and thought he could use a special mobility device called a PET cart. We import PET carts in addition to the hundreds of traditional and specialty wheelchairs we help deliver to families every year. The carts are sometimes a handier way for a person with a disability to get around, depending on the terrain in the neighborhood and maybe even the terrain inside the house. A bike chain carries power from a hand crank down to a drive wheel, and the driver goes where he pleases.

One great feature of a PET cart is that there’s room under the seat to carry things around. The day I visited, Ronal had a bottle of water, some tools and grease for the chain, some face masks, and a big speaker. You know, for the mobile music. For a boy digging holes in the ground, alone, the work goes quicker when when he’s got something he can sing along with.

COVID is still a hard reality in

Guatemala. As I write this, not even one percent of Guatemalans have been fully vaccinated. The stories in the news are bad, and the stories from friends and partners are worse.

Getting around Guatemala is more difficult than it used to be (and if you’ve been there, you know that’s saying something).

It’s been hard for patients to travel to doctors, and hard for doctors to travel to patients. We knew that peoples’ medical needs wouldn’t go away in a situation like this, but if we wondered about our partners slowing down, we didn’t have to wonder long. Through Vine, you’re still getting millions of dollars worth of medicine and supplies to providers treating people who need it most. In the last 12 months, we’ve distributed about $16M in medicine, food, supplies, vitamins, wheelchairs, and the occasional PET cart. The medical providers in our network are doing what they’ve always done - taking care of people who need it. And because you’ve continued to give, we’re doing what we’ve always done - give them the means to treat, not just diagnose. We think it’s a concrete and meaningful expression of God’s love for people.

The wonder of it is that

in a time when Vine’s staff can’t make it all the way out to where the medicine you bought is given to the families who need it, it hasn’t really mattered. Our old relationships run deeper and longer than this pandemic, and we’ve even met some new friends like Don Lalo, folks who have an eye out for people who’ve been overlooked. The best of what we do is happening anyway. And of course it doesn’t happen without you. Thank you!

Not long after I met Ronal, Nacho told me that he and Lalo came up with a plan to pour a concrete patio onto the little dirt alley he made when he put up the fence. It would be cleaner, and it would make it an easier roll for Ronal.

The two of them bought the steel and the concrete, Nacho brought his mixer, and friends volunteered all the labor. They bought Ronal a bed, and even brought a tablet that Ronal could use for school. Lalo checks in on Ronal and his family every week.

It still works, in other words.

Your gifts are still turned into real help for people all over Guatemala. Including guys like Ronal, who doesn’t have to crawl or be carried anymore. He cranks himself up the hills and brakes his way down, and he even has the benefit of a mobile sound system as he’s going about his day. Thank you for making it possible.

-Brady Greene, for the Vine team