The Spokesman Review  March 8, 2009  The Miracle of Mobility

Inland Northwest PET Project provides wheels, dignity to Third World’s disabled

Dick Carpenter cleans up a Personal Energy Transportation System Monday, March 2, 2009 while working with other volunteers to prepare and ship the trykes to Third World

On a gray Monday in February, retired Spokane attorney Dick Carpenter arrived at the headquarters of the Inland Northwest PET Project – a shop perched on a hillside in Colbert’s Little Spokane River Valley.

By the time Carpenter went home, he and his friends had filled another FedEx semitruck with 50 Personal Energy Transporters to be distributed in Third World countries.

A PET is a hand-pedaled vehicle (a lumber-and-steel cross between a tricycle and a SmartCar) made for people who don’t have use of their legs – those whose poverty is caused or deepened by an inability to rise from the ground.

“PETs get people out of the dirt and into dignity,” Carpenter said. [Read Full Article]

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The Fig Tree  December 2005

Toy builders and others build PET carts for people who have lost their legs to land mines, disease

In a small barn behind his home on Little Spokane River Dr. north of Spokane, Dick Carpenter has tires, wood pieces and other parts to make Personal Energy Transportation (PET) vehicles to give mobility to people who have lost legs to land mines, polio, leprosy, birth defects or animal bites in impoverished countries.

In February, he read an article on PET vehicles and called Dave Noble, who promotes them locally at CROP Walks.

Then Dick, a commissioned lay pastor in the Presbyterian Church and a member of Whitworth Community Presbyterian, visited Penney Farms, Fla., a community for retired pastors and missionaries that makes up to five PETs a month.

The idea started when Larry and Laura Hills, missionaries for 42 years in Zambia and Zimbabwe, requested a hand-pedal vehicle for people without legs, who would otherwise have to drag themselves in the dirt to go somewhere. [Read Full Article]