Lend Me a Hand

It was May 2011, near Johannesburg, South Africa.

Richard Van As was a carpenter. That day, at home, he lost control of his saw. He lost two fingers on his right hand. Two more were mangled.

The doctors could not reattach them. An electronic hand cost hundreds of thousands of rand. He could not afford one.

So he searched the Internet for another way.

He came across a video. In Bellingham, Washington, a special effects artist and puppeteer, Ivan Owen, was showing a large puppet hand. Its fingers moved on thin steel cables, like tendons.

Richard Van As wrote to him. Without much detail, he asked if he was keen to "lend me a hand."

Ivan Owen said yes.

The two men lived about 16,000 kilometres apart. They worked over Skype, sending ideas and parts back and forth. Richard even sent him a copy of his hand, cast in plastic.

One day, a South African mother wrote to them. Her son, Liam, was five. He had been born without fingers on his right hand.

Ivan Owen flew to South Africa. Together, the two men built Liam a small hand with aluminium fingers.

The day it was fitted, Liam bent his wrist. The fingers curled.

Ivan Owen told what happened next. The little boy looked up and said: "It copies me."

Within days, Liam could pick up small coins.

Then Ivan Owen wrote to a 3D printer company. It gave them printers. What used to take a week or more now took twenty minutes: design a part, print it, try it.

After that, Richard Van As said, there was no stopping them.

They could have filed a patent. They did the opposite. They put the designs online, for free, so that anyone, anywhere, could print a hand.

In 2013, a man named Jon Schull saw one of Ivan Owen's videos. He invited anyone who wanted to help to sign up. About a hundred people answered at first. It was the beginning of a network: e-NABLE.

By 2019, it counted some 30,000 volunteers. Together, they had given away about 7,000 printed hands and arms, in more than 100 countries.

For Richard Van As, it had all started with a hardship. He put it simply:

A hand is never made alone. It takes one that asks, another that answers, then thousands that print, assemble and give. Ubuntu says it this way: we become fully human through the hands of others.

It had all started with an email of a few lines.

A man who had lost his fingers asked a stranger to lend him a hand.

About thirty thousand people ended up answering.