CLAY COUNTY, Fla. -- Inside a humble building in Penney Farms, just outside Green Cove Springs, a powerful mission is underway.
Sounds of drilling, sawing, and hammering fill the building.
Volunteers -- like elves in a workshop -- are building carts for strangers in third world countries. The colorful carts are called PETs, which stands for personal energy transportation.
The PETs are hand-cranked because the people who receive them can't use their legs because of disease, land mines injuries or birth defects. They are left to live on the ground.
"These people need help," said Larry Hills, who came up with the idea for PETs as a missionary in Africa. During a walk one day, he literally almost stumbled on a woman who was crawling on the ground.
"As I was going along, suddenly there's a woman right in front of me. She was on her stomach with a baby tied to her back, like Africans do. And behind her, there were a couple more little ones," Hills said.
She could not walk and she crawled to survive. So Hills, with help from another minister and an engineer, devised the PET. He said there was a simple reason why.
"Jesus said if you've done it for the least of these, you've done it for me," Hills said plainly. "I said I've got to do something for these people. There isn't anybody least-er than they are.'"
Seventeen years later, PET workshops pepper the United States. The PETs are packed and shipped to countries around the world.
"It's a life changing experience for someone who's always been carried to all of a sudden be put on a PET," said Barbara Chase, who has been with PET for 10 years.
She said PET provide freedom previously unknown to those who use them.
"They can go to school for the first time. They can do shopping. They can get a job," Chase marveled. "It not only changes the individual, it changes the family. It also changes the community because all of a sudden the community sees this person ... has a sense of respect and dignity."
And the PET recipients are as diverse as the volunteers who make the devices. On one day in October, at the Penney Farms PET Place workshop, there was a retired salesman, a missionary and a welder.
Ken DeVore of Flagler Estates had his face shielded as sparks flew from his welding table. "I came two or three times just to work," DeVore recalled. "Then they realized I could weld! And I've been in this corner [of the building] ever since!"
DeVore used to weld and build forklifts for a living. Retired, now he helps lift people off the ground. "It's one of those things. You give, but you receive more than you give," DeVore held back tears.
On the other side of the PET Place building, Ted Emack of Crescent Beach was sanding wood. He's a retired salesman and currently has a wheelchair equipment ministry.
Emack remembered how he learned about PET. He had just given a man a wheelchair in Jamaica. "When I got back, someone in Crescent Beach told me there's this gizmo I'd be interested in," Emack stated.
That gizmo was the PET. Emack chose to take a PET to that same man in Jamaica, and it enabled the man to travel on rural roads where wheelchairs don't work.
"Oh! It's given him mobility," Emack beamed.
It's life-changing mobility. And the PET phenomenon is spreading, with 24 workshops around the nation and deliveries to 90 countries now.
However, like many charities, PET is seeing fewer donations dropping into its change purse; it costs $250 dollars to build and provide a person a PET.
And when they get one, PET co-founder Hills said, "Oh, that's our paycheck! They just beam and exclaim and they got a new life!"
Hills said he recently thought of the Bible story in which Jesus multiplied a boy's fish and loaves of bread to feed a large crowd.
"I thought, 'how'd that little boy feel about what happened? ' And then I thought, 'That's me! I had this idea, and look at what happened!'"
Hills held his hands out wide and motioned to the workshop.
MORE: Information about PET International or here for PET Florida.
First Coast News