PHOTO: JOHN MERRILL ’77/MERRILLIMAGES.COM

PHOTO: JOHN MERRILL ’77/MERRILLIMAGES.COM

More than 500 people in Peru are newly mobile, thanks to members of the Class of 1977 who distributed wheelchairs in August to seven villages and cities for a 35th-reunion class-service project. Pictured, left to right, are Daniel Finch, Christina Finch (children of Maturin Finch ’77), and Ronald Perkowski ’77 with a recipient. Bill Farrell ’77 led the effort, and David Behring ’77, president of the Wheelchair Foundation, helped coordinate the logistics. Railroad entrepreneur Henry Posner III ’77 arranged for the transportation of 30 classmates and family members and the wheelchairs in one of his company’s trains — from sea level to high in the Andes. The volunteers assembled the chairs and helped the recipients learn to use them. Farrell had seen mothers and grandmothers carrying children bigger than themselves because they had no wheelchairs. A wheelchair, he said, “changes more than one person’s life.”