Squatting Toilets in Peru The western world is full of chairs. We have chairs in our kitchens, offices, cafes, living rooms and our bathrooms. Traveling in Ecuador and Peru, I encountered considerably fewer chairs than I was accustomed to in the US. One conspicuous place that the chair was often absent was the bathroom. In […]

The ulnar nerve injury I acquired from pressure on my palm while biking in Peru has now completely healed and function is normal. It took about six weeks to heal from the time I stopped biking. You can read more about the injury in my prior blog post.s. Me unable to adduct my pinky when […]

After less than an hour of navigating the tandem bicycle through the crowded sweaty streets of Iquitos, Peru we were parched. Our bodies were perspiring relentlessly in a failing attempt to combat the combination of radiant heat from the Equatorial sun and body heat from the thousands of Peruvians packed into the market. We didn’t […]

What is a Tolerance Bandwidth? If you read my post on the human-environment interaction that results in disability you will already know where I am coming from. I posit that discomfort, like disability, is the result of a human-environment interaction. You are comfortable when the environment is somewhere within your preferred range of conditions. I […]

The preferred backpack of the Peruvian Andes is a blanket folded into a triangle, wrapped around the shoulders and tied in front of the chest. This backpack is simply called “manta” (ie blanket) by the Peruvians and is used to carrying things as varied as babies, five gallon buckets, and huge loads of sticks and […]

Now more than a month after I noticed that I had lost the ability to adduct my right pinky, I have gained about half of that motion back. The 8-10hrs of daily riding in Peru ended 18 days ago. My manual dexterity is within functional limits, and grip strength is find for all tasks of […]

“Recent conceptual frameworks of disability highlight the important role of the environment in the disablement process; that is, people are believed to interact with their environments to produce disabilities” (IOM, 1997; Teel et al., 1997).  Person-Environment Interaction Nobody is intrinsically disabled. And many people who are “fully-abled” in the technology saturated environment of the United […]

My Hands on Skyline The first time my pinky stopped working was on a bike ride down Skyline drive in California. The combination of cold rain and wind removed the heat from my ungloved hands faster than my blood could replace it. We pulled over to stop because I was having difficulty operating the brakes, […]