Schoolgirl makes wheelchairs for animals and sends them to everyone for free

“You can’t live in vain,” says Kristina Stankova, a 17-year-old student from Ussuriysk, Primorsky Krai. The realization of this simple truth came to her at the age of 10, and today the girl regrets only that it is so late! Before the fourth grade, she, like most children of her age, spent hours after school playing computer games, but today she considers this a waste of time.

For the fact that she became a volunteer, Kristina is grateful to her gymnasium. First, the girl went out with friends to subbotniks organized by their school, then she joined various kinds of environmental actions. In 2018, Kristina read about the local animal shelter, organized friends, and they collected food and bedding for the shelter’s pets and took them to the shelter.

There Kristina saw a little dog with a loud name Mukhtar, his legs were paralyzed and he was moving around in an imported wheelchair that volunteers had bought for him.

The girl, having returned home, sat down at the computer to study information about such devices for animals with disabilities. They were all exclusively foreign-made and insanely expensive.

She began to think about how many animals are put to sleep every year because their owners have no money to buy these assistive devices to help their pets.

So she thought, why not design her own baby carriage? The idea was supported by her father, and now the first prototype is ready, made of polypropylene pipes with wheels from an old baby carriage. Christina sewed a soft base for it to support the animal’s torso. But what next?

The girl decided to take her idea to the masses, creating a page on Instagram. So, thanks to the word of mouth, an old lady who lived in the countryside and who had a paralyzed dog heard about her invention. They phoned, the size of the wheelchair matched, and the first product of the girl not only found its owner, but serves him to this day, after almost three years.

Thanks to the Internet more and more people learned about Kristina and her invention, she received phone calls, asking for help. She specified sizes, and after school she got to the machine. The schoolgirl would not take money for her products, so she had to take a summer job to earn money for materials. In the first year she made 20 baby carriages to order, and in the following year … 220!

Of course, so many wheelchairs Christina would not be able to make purely even for financial reasons, but she began to carry more and more wheels from strollers, scraps of pipes, cloth. For the fact that she became a volunteer, Kristina is grateful to her gymnasium. They included materials, heartfelt letters, and even presents. Good deed united people of different ages and occupations.

And, of course, the parents. Christina’s grandmother and mother are very generous, they instilled in her love and compassion for animals. Her mother Olga did not have to ask her to take an abandoned puppy or a wounded bird, she would pick them up, save them, treat them… And so it came out that today they have four cats, three dogs and lots of other small animals living at home.

© Stankov family personal archive

Christina says of her future profession: perhaps I will become a veterinarian, or a translator. Learning languages are very easy for her. And the girl is also fond of music, she plays several instruments. In any case, no matter where she studies after high school, Kristina does not intend to quit her job, and now she is teaching her younger sister Alexa to continue to help disadvantaged animals to lead a full and active life together.