Paraplegic engineer helps wounded Ukrainians build wheelchairs
Paul de Livron, a French engineer who became paraplegic after a hiking accident, now builds wooden wheelchairs and runs a workshop in Lviv’s Unbroken Rehabilitation Center. He uses birch plywood from Ukraine to create inexpensive, simple-to-assemble wheelchairs aimed at helping people with limited resources, especially in developing countries. Livron has already supplied a custom wooden wheelchair to Pope Francis during his 2023 visit to Marseille and completed the Marathon Pour Tous in Paris in 2024. In 2025 he established a partnership with Unbroken, guiding Ukrainian men to build their own wheelchairs, and the workshop continues to operate after his departure. The initiative reflects a broader humanitarian mission to provide marginalized populations, particularly wounded Ukrainians, with accessible mobility solutions.
about 1 month ago
Paul de Livron, a French engineer who became paraplegic after a hiking accident, has been building inexpensive wooden wheelchairs and teaching wounded Ukrainians to make their own, turning his personal disability into a humanitarian project that combines rehabilitation with skill‑training. 1
Livron founded Apollo Wooden Wheelchairs in 2022 after abandoning his original plan to become a forestry engineer. He designs simple, low‑cost wooden wheelchairs that can be assembled with basic tools, a concept he first showcased by gifting a custom wooden chair to Pope Francis in 2023 and by completing the Marathon Pour Tous in Paris in 2024. 1
Livron’s goal is to provide marginalized people, especially in developing nations, with affordable, easy‑to‑build wheelchairs. He emphasizes that wooden wheelchairs require inexpensive tools compared with metal models, making them suitable for resource‑limited settings. 1
In August 2025 Livron traveled to Lviv and partnered with the Unbroken National Rehabilitation Center, the country’s largest facility for war‑injured veterans. By October 2025 he had set up a workshop inside the center, where six Ukrainian men—four recent war casualties and two long‑time disabled individuals—built their own wheelchairs under his guidance. The workshop remained active after his return to France. 1
Livron reports that the hands‑on work occupies participants’ minds, reducing intrusive thoughts and fostering a sense of pride and joy. He observed a particularly withdrawn veteran gradually open up, joke, and assist with workshop tasks, illustrating the psychological benefits of constructive activity. 1
The Lviv workshop was financed by 262 Ulule donors, raising €11,376, and received equipment donations from German tool maker Festool, which supplied high‑quality tools at discounted rates. Livron plans to open a second Apollo workshop in Kyiv, supported by the Leroy Merlin solidarity foundation. 1
How does Catholic charity guide engineering aid for war‑victims?
Catholic charity guides engineering aid for war victims by treating technical work not merely as reconstruction, but as service to the human person, an expression of solidarity, and an instrument of peace. Engineering projects should therefore protect life, restore dignity, involve local communities, and avoid reinforcing violence or injustice.
Catholic social teaching begins with the conviction that every person possesses inherent dignity and has a right to the necessities required for life and human flourishing. This principle applies directly to engineering aid: safe water, sanitation, shelter, electricity, transport, communications, medical facilities, and accessible buildings are not luxuries when war has destroyed the conditions of human life.
Aid must therefore be designed around people rather than around impressive infrastructure. Engineers should ask:
This is consistent with Pope Leo XIV’s description of Catholic charitable service as alleviating suffering, relieving burdens, and finding solutions to inhumane situations while respecting the dignity of individuals and families.
Catholic charity recognizes a hierarchy of needs in a war zone. Immediate survival takes priority over long-term development, although the two should eventually be connected.
The Church’s response to post-war Ethiopia and Eritrea provides a practical framework. It identified the need to care for those wounded in body and spirit, support widows and orphans, resettle displaced persons and demobilized soldiers, reunite families, rebuild homes, and restore social and economic life.
For engineering aid, this may mean:
Emergency safety
Essential services
Recovery
The aim is not simply to replace damaged objects, but to restore the social conditions in which families and communities can live securely.
Pope Francis insists that humanitarian action must confront the concrete suffering of victims rather than remain at the level of abstract discussion. He calls attention to civilians killed as “collateral damage,” refugees and displaced persons, mothers who have lost children, and children maimed or deprived of their childhood.
This has important engineering consequences. Technical assessments should include direct consultation with affected people. Engineers should listen to:
Such consultation is not merely a project-management technique. It is a moral act of recognizing victims as agents with knowledge, rights, and a voice. Pope John Paul II described the Church as listening particularly to the plea of victims, because their testimony reveals the human meaning and moral scandal of war.
Catholic charity does not distribute assistance solely according to political influence, military importance, or economic return. It gives special attention to those who are poor, displaced, wounded, orphaned, elderly, or otherwise unable to secure help for themselves.
The Catholic organizations’ appeal concerning health care identifies solidarity, the common good, and a preferential option for poor and vulnerable people as principles requiring protection of essential services. The same logic applies to engineering:
Pope Leo XIV describes Catholic charitable networks as “agents of hope” who make God’s providence concrete through food, shelter, medical care, legal assistance, and other forms of practical care, especially for migrants and refugees. Engineering aid belongs within this same practical ministry of hope.
Post-war engineering must address the social fabric damaged by conflict. Rebuilding a bridge, for example, may reunite families, reopen access to hospitals, enable children to attend school, and revive local commerce. Restoring a water network may reduce disease, permit families to return, and lessen tensions over scarce resources.
The Church’s approach therefore favors projects that promote:
Pope John Paul II described recovery and long-term development as a “twofold responsibility”: repairing immediate war damage while contributing to the enduring development of the people. A Catholic engineering agency should consequently avoid short-term interventions that undermine future resilience or impose systems that local communities cannot maintain.
Catholic charity is directed toward victims as persons, not toward victory for one faction. Pius XII called Christians to imitate the Good Samaritan by recognizing that war victims have a right to compassion and help. This supports impartial assistance to civilians wherever they are found.
Engineering aid should therefore be carefully screened:
This does not mean every dual-use technology is automatically forbidden. Roads, power grids, bridges, and communications can serve both civilians and military personnel. The moral question concerns the project’s purpose, foreseeable use, safeguards, and proportionality. A project intended principally to sustain civilian life can be morally distinct from one intended to increase a party’s capacity to wage war.
Catholic charity is not satisfied with good intentions alone. Engineering aid must be professionally competent, safe, accountable, and technically sustainable. The work should include:
Pius XII emphasized that Christian charity is more than generic philanthropy: it is a participation in Christ’s love. He also portrayed the charitable worker as a Good Samaritan who brings bodily nourishment while addressing wounds and offering encouragement, hope, and peace. Thus professional excellence and personal concern belong together. A technically sound project that humiliates, manipulates, or neglects the people it serves would fall short of authentically Catholic charity.
War victims need more than physical reconstruction. They may carry grief, trauma, guilt, displacement, and the loss of religious or cultural landmarks. Engineering projects should respect cemeteries, churches, schools, family homes, and places of communal memory wherever possible.
Catholic aid should also avoid treating beneficiaries as passive recipients. Pope Leo XIV stresses that displaced people possess intrinsic human dignity and should participate fully in community life; he describes charitable work as building bridges between nations, cultures, and peoples. In practical terms, this means employing local professionals, consulting community leaders, respecting religious customs, and ensuring that reconstruction strengthens rather than erases communal identity.
Catholic engineering aid should relieve suffering while also reducing the conditions that make renewed conflict more likely. Rebuilding shared infrastructure can create cooperation between divided communities. Equitable access to water, energy, transport, education, and health care can address grievances and support reconciliation.
Yet reconstruction cannot substitute for justice. Pope John Paul II teaches that confronting war requires reflection on responsibility, forgiveness, and asking forgiveness. Engineering agencies should therefore support, within their competence, documentation, accountability, and non-discriminatory reconstruction rather than conceal destruction or reward aggression.
Catholic charity guides engineering aid according to several integrated principles:
Engineering aid becomes authentically Catholic when infrastructure serves the wounded person, strengthens the community, and makes concrete the Church’s conviction that victims of war have a right to compassion and help.