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The Rural Ambulance
NPR is reporting:
When Chris Ategeka was 9, his younger brother died while Ategeka was
helping to carry him to the nearest hospital — 10 miles from their
village in Fort Portal, Uganda.
There was no quicker way to get
his sick brother, who was coughing and had a bloody stool, to medical
care. "I did not understand the concept of lack of mobility being the
biggest factor until it got later in life. I realized how that could
have helped so much," he tells Shots.
Ategeka and his five siblings became orphans after their mother and
father died of AIDS. But Ategeka, now 28, considers himself lucky.
A U.S. aid organization
helped AIDS orphans like him attend school. Ategeka did well. He
impressed the California family that sponsored him so much that they
invited him to come live with them in 2006.
Since then, he has
earned engineering degrees at University of California, Berkeley, where
he'll begin a doctorate in mechanical engineering this fall. And he's
been using what he learned already to solve the problem that contributed
to the death of his brother nearly 20 years ago.
Ategeka founded ,
a nonprofit that teaches villagers how to build bike ambulances and
wheelchairs from scrap metal. "I teach you how to make it, and I teach
you how to fix it," he says. "If it breaks, you know what to do, and if
you want to build something you think outside the box and you do it."
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