The new coronavirus seems to have slowed down across Japan, but there are still signs of increasing infections in Tokyo and Kitakyushu. We’re worried that they might indicate the beginning of the second wave of big infection. In this situation, many events around Japan such as fireworks and festivals have been cancelled.
Our monthly meeting is not that big in scale, but we should think that our activity has the same risk of infection. In order to prevent infection from our activity, we have decided to cancel our monthly meetings from June through August. So far we’ve sent overseas children more than 500 wheelchairs a year, but we’re afraid we won’t be able to do the same thing this year. The main reason is that we can’t hold monthly meetings. We’re also worried about the situation of presentee countries and overseas partners.
In spite of this sad situation, there’re things we can do. As for a country like Malaysia, where we can trust the overseas partner to clean and refurbish wheelchairs by themselves, we have delivered used wheelchairs without cleaning or refurbishing them. We’re thinking of doing the same to such countries if the trasporting conditions are met.
Now we have difficulty refurbishing and sending wheelchairs. When the situation improves and it becomes possible for us to restart our activities, we’d like to go ahead on donating wheelchairs as usual. Let’s take good care of ourselves and I look forward to meeting you again.
June 4, 2020 Hirokazu Morita