Sri Lestari travels by motorcycle 
to empower people with disabilities

PictureSri Lestari and her modified motorcycle
Traveling by modified motorcycle Sri Lestari rides around Indonesia giving disabled people new hope.

Sri doesn’t let her inability to walk diminish her passion. For example, in May this social worker for Wheels for Humanity drove for more than 750 miles from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, to Ubud, on the island of Bali, on a campaign to empower disabled people. Her life’s mission is to prove that being disabled still means freedom, and it starts with the very thing that first injured her: a motorcycle.

When she was 23, a motorcycle accident left her paralyzed from the chest down. She fell into a deep depression spending the next 10 years in her home in Klaten, in Central Java, embroidering to help her family and rarely going outside. She was beginning to accept she might never walk again, but that there were things she could do to improve her wellbeing. 

Things changed in 2006, when Sri decided to undertake volunteer work making Braille books for the visually impaired. “On that very first day volunteering I heard about a motor bike I could drive while sitting in my chair,” says Sri of the moment her world began to brighten.
Within a few years — and with a lot of help from Caritas and other sponsors — Sri had her own modified motorcycle and discovered there was life after her accident.

“I was again independent and doing useful work,” says Sri, who is now a social worker in Yogyakarta with Wheels for Humanity Indonesia, an organization that supplies wheelchairs to people living with paraplegia, spina bifida, cerebral palsy and other circumstances preventing people from walking.

“So many people in need don’t have wheelchairs, so they are kept at home. Wheels for Humanity has given out 5000 wheelchairs in Indonesia already. The numbers supplied by the government are just not enough, and the government gives adult-sized chairs to children, which leads to scoliosis of the spine,” explains Sri who, during her extraordinary trek from Jakarta to Bali, met with disability organizations, field workers and former prisoners to share how others can also live life without limits.

Sri is a fierce advocate for those living with disabilities. 

“I hope my experience can spread all around the world [the message] that disabled people really need accessible transportation.” 

She reasons that even though the government of Indonesia offers vocational training to the disabled community in how to bake cakes, sew, or make handicrafts, in an effort to help them earn a living, this type of assistance is meaningless, she says, if people have no transportation to leave their villages to sell their products.

Heny Prabaningrum, the deputy director of United Cerebral Palsy in Yogyakarta,  says that Sri inspires her clients and shows them that independence can be a reality, despite their disabilities.

“I think I am a good example. So many parents will see the positive things from me – that even if they have children with a disability, they have a brighter purpose, that hopefully their children can be like me,” Sri says. “They can be free and independent!”
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Posted Jan 2014

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