https://www.berkshireeagle.com/news/central_berkshires/medical-equipment-donations-honduras/article_68f6deb4-8352-11ef-bdec-57372acd7178.html
PITTSFIELD — Eddie O’Toole is a man with ideas and energy in abundance, and he’s eager to share both.
At age 68, when he’s not fixing cars as an independent auto mechanic, O’Toole is busy coordinating volunteer efforts and donations for his nonprofit organization, Berkshire Amistad.
On Saturday afternoon, his organization held an open house at the 117 Fourth St., Pittsfield warehouse where equipment donations are being stored until they can be loaded into a shipping container.
They’ll head to a port in Delaware and then loaded on a cargo ship to Honduras, where O’Toole served in the Peace Corps and later lived with his family for 13 years. The organization works with the people of Guaimaca, Honduras, and professor Edmundo Mendez Sanchez.
How does his wife Kelly keep up? “Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t,” she said, laughing.
That energy is driven by O’Toole’s enthusiasm and his resolute belief in the mission. That’s evident in the way his eyes light up when you ask him why he does this work.
“I think if people feed us, and we’re throwing good things away and they need it. I think we have to do this,” he said.
O’Toole readies used medical supplies headed for Honduras
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O’Toole readies used medical supplies headed for Honduras
Recently, O’Toole’s group collected unused wheelchairs and crutches from UCP of Pittsfield; filing cabinets, chairs and computer tables from Berkshire Community College; and exam tables, hospital beds and wheelchairs from Fairview Hospital and Berkshire Medical Center. The open house was held with the hope of drawing volunteers to help the operation, and donations to pay for the shipping.
stacks of crutches
In their Pittsfield warehouse, Berkshire Amistad has organized discarded hospital and personal medical equipment into rows that will fit inside of empty container trucks that would otherwise stay empty on their trips back to Honduras after delivering banana shipments in the U.S.
STEPHANIE ZOLLSHAN — THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE
GONE BANANAS
How will the equipment go from the Berkshires to Honduras? There’s where his abundance of ideas kick in.
O’Toole became aware that a company that ships bananas grown in Honduras was delivering a shipping container full of the fruit to a warehouse in Hatfield. Figuring there’s no reason the container should go home empty, O’Toole arranged for it to stop in Pittsfield on its way back to a shipping terminal in Delaware, so he can load it with the donations he’s collected.
Has he ever.
Inside the warehouse, donated items are neatly grouped together within the boundaries of the containers in which they’ll travel — 8 feet by 10 feet — and prepared for transport. The crutches are taped and zip-tied together. The walkers have been disassembled so more of them fit. So have the office desks and chairs he gathered at a tag sale at Berkshire Community College — items he said the college had in storage for a decade.
There are exam tables — “you can turn a closet into an exam room with an exam table,” he explained — as well as hospital beds, chairs and other items that could help provide medical care to people in need.
And this isn’t all; O’Toole has more donations stored in a warehouse in West Stockbridge.
“That right there is 100 crutches. I can’t only ship 100 crutches,” O’Toole said, pointing to where they were neatly stacked. “The last shipment I shipped was 85 wheelchairs, 300 crutches and 50 walkers. I drove to Delaware and put it in a container and shipped it down there. In one day, we gave away 60 wheelchairs. So this is nowhere near what I need, as far as wheelchairs, so I need to really find who’s throwing away wheelchairs — or anything that could be valuable.”
O’Toole has given equipment to people in need in the Berkshires as well.
KINDNESS AND INGENUITY
Donations help, too — like the $7,500 from an unnamed Pittsfield donor that allowed O’Toole to purchase a moving truck that once belonged to Tanglewood. On Saturday, that truck was still full of the used office equipment he picked up at BCC; he’s getting volunteers to unload the contents into the warehouse.
The filing cabinets O’Toole obtained from BCC could house another of his ideas.
“I can’t ship filing cabinets empty” he said, opening one to reveal its contents: air. “So if people donate eyeglasses, I can put 1,200 eyeglasses in one drawer of a filing cabinet. How useful, right? I could get people from all over the country to just put 10 pairs of reading glasses in a bag and mail them to me.”
Those drawers could also hold plastic medicine bottles. In Honduras, medications are often distributed in bags. But O’Toole knows of a clinic that could give out the bottles instead, and allow patients to re-use them.
“It’s a silly thing, but it’s a good example that we throw so much stuff away that people can use,” he said.
The work has real value in people’s lives, he said, offering the example of a Honduran woman who needed a prosthetic leg. O’Toole obtained one and fitted it for her.
A year later, when he returned to visit, she told him “You never realize how much you change things when you’re gone … All I wanted to do was wash the dishes, and you made that possible. I can wash the dishes now.”
“It’s crazy, right?” he said.
Then there was the time, while O’Toole was living in Honduras, that Guaimaca needed a community building after Hurricane Mitch heavily damaged the country. Thanks to a $15,000 donation from a Lenox couple, O’Toole found an abandoned building facing demolition in Springfield, took it apart, and sent its contents to Central America.
By school bus.
“I came home, I disassembled the building and put it in a school bus” that he bought with the money, O’Toole said. The seats came out and everything that could be re-used went in. He drove the bus to Delaware, thankful it was never pulled over for weighing, and met the cargo ship in Honduras.
“I sold the bus. I got all my money back,” O’Toole said. “I had solid wood, doors, electrical panels, outlet switches, and it all fit in the school bus. And I had $15,000 in my pocket again, and with my neighbors, we built a building.”
O’Toole first came to the Berkshires to visit a friend from the Air Force, in which he served for four years, and settled in Pittsfield. He and his wife, Kelly, a testing technician in the city wastewater treatment department, met in the early 1990s at protests against the first U.S. war in Iraq in front of the Silvio O. Conte Federal Building on Columbus Street in Pittsfield. They’ve been married more than 30 years and have an adult daughter, Sonrisa, who works as a bilingual mental health support specialist.
ASKING QUESTIONS
Where did O’Toole’s do-it-yourself streak and willingness to take on challenges come from? He thinks it started with his first job, at an auto garage.
Growing up on Long Island, the fifth of 15 children, O’Toole did not want to attend the same high school as his four older siblings. His mother said that was fine, as long as he got a job.
So O’Toole visited a nearby auto garage, where the manager, a man named Tex, hired him on the spot and asked him to wash the windows and check the oil of every car that drove in.
“I said, ‘Tex, I have never checked the oil on anything.’ He said ‘Can you ask questions?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I can ask questions.’ He said, ‘If you can ask questions, you can do anything.’”
“So all morning long I was asking questions,” O’Toole continued. “[Tex] comes over to me later and says, ‘Listen, we need to put a water pump in this Renault station wagon. Today.’ I said ‘Tex, I have never touched a car before!’”
“He said, ‘Can you ask questions?’ I said ‘Yes, I can ask questions!'”
Tex offered the same reply, O’Toole said: “‘You can do anything if you ask questions.’ And I really think that a lot of what has happened in my life is kind of because of that.”
Reach Greg Sukiennik at gsukiennik@berkshireeagle.com or at 413-496-6249.