The ‘Speelthijnbaan’ by Thijn Broers (15) from Eindhoven was officially opened on Wednesday. He himself gave the starting signal, in a borrowed wheelchair, proud of pride. To see then how all other children could go from it. Exactly as he wanted.
“I will talk to you like that. Can I first finish my round?” Asks Limburg Lucas (10). It is just about his 20th round, with its electric wheelchair, over a race track in the Bolomeystraat in Eindhoven. He then finished his course with a rumbling over the slide. Together with his parents, he drove especially from Sittard to Eindhoven. “So I could get off the slide,” he says radiantly. He bounces up and down in his chair while he tells about it. “This was the very first time.”
Lucas has a muscle disease, making him tired very quickly. “A normal slide, or cable car is very tiring,” he explains. Then he has to climb out of his wheelchair, slide and then back in. Not handy.
So Thijn saw that too. Four years ago he saw his peers watching the slide, because they could not get rid of it with their wheelchair themselves. While Thijn could. “I thought that was pathetic,” he says. So he designed a wheelchair slide at a competition of the discovery factory. He won. “And now I stand next to my own idea four years later. That is very strange, because it is actually mine. Not many people can say that.”
“It is a kind of roller coaster feeling, through the chair and the wheels,” he says in his ‘borrowed’ wheelchair. “But I would prefer to see this in more places in Eindhoven.” Fortunately, alderman Rik Thijs did have ears.
“The idea of Thijn has ensured that we have taken measures in the municipality for 10 playgrounds,” the alderman explains. In some places they have removed sand, so that wheelchair wheels can drive through the playground more easily. Rubber mats are laid in other places, with the same purpose. “And in the coming years we will make a large investment in even four places, so that in every district of children in a wheelchair can play nicely. Or perhaps also adults,” says Thijs.
For example, he himself is not the worst. To deduce the slide, he takes a seat in a wheelchair, to shake off the slope with a true fear of death in his eyes. On the heels followed by Lucas.
“I think I’ve been five times now,” he says proudly, when he is down again. “And that I will go one more time.”