Love and Hands

Love and Hands

When I joined the Memorial-Spring Branch Rotary Club they were there.  Carter Franklin is a big, loving, Daddy-bear of a man and Sheila Franklin is a tiny, sharp-minded whirlwind of a woman.  Carter loves taking care of people, and Sheila loves getting things done.  I love the story of their courtship.  In 1999, Carter moved in across the street from Sheila. They got acquainted quickly and over the next few years, back and forth across the street, they got to be really good friends.  They married on November 5, 2005.  Sheila said, “At our age, we never know how many anniversaries we’ll get, so we decided to celebrate every month.”  And they do.

In June of 2013, Carter and Sheila went to Lisbon, Portugal for the Rotary International Convention 2013.  Carter would take office as president of our club in July, for 2013-2014, and Sheila was President-Elect for the next year, 2014-2015.  In between sessions, as they walked through the Convention hall looking at exhibits of projects from other Rotary Clubs, Carter saw a strange device. The Rotarian in the booth told him that it was a “non-medical prosthetic hand”.  He learned that these hands were being produced in Northern California and distributed and fitted by Rotary clubs world-wide. Pictured with the hand here, are the people who assembled it.  Assembling these hands is used as a Corporate Team Building Exercise by companies in California. By the time they returned to Houston, the couple had decided that returning functionality to people who had lost their hands would be a fitting legacy for them to create.  Visit the LN-4 website to see the hand in use.  (http://www.ln-4.org/) 

Carter and Sheila’s first hand went to Mexico.   Rod Mace, another of the Memorial Spring Branch Rotary Club members, identified a potential recipient for the first hand from Houston and took it with him on his quarterly journey to Guerrero Clinic, another Rotary District 5890 project.  (http://www.guerreroclinic.org/).  “Champion” Almeda was waiting impatiently down in Guerrero.  He had lost his right hand when he was 9 years old in a fishing accident with his father.  In the club’s weekly meeting, Rod shared the moving moment when “Champion” first wrote his name with his right hand.

Now Carter and Sheila Franklin are looking for other potential hand recipients.  If you know someone who has lost a hand and can’t afford a non-medical prosthesis, please contact Carter Franklin, The Rotary Club of Memorial Spring Branch at carter.franklin@sbcglobal.net.