The following are the newest pictures photographed at PET Florida. They were professionally taken by Penney Retirement Community resident Jim Hennigar in January 2022 and show volunteers in various phases of producing mobility carts. Music accompanies the photos.
Larry Hills, missionary and co-founder of PET, passed on to glory on June 3, 2020. He and his wife, Laura, had retired to Penney Retirement Community at Penney Farms, FL, in 1999. Under Larry’s direction, the first mobility cart (or PET) at Penney Farms was produced in 2001. He is profoundly missed, but his deep spiritual commitment to convey the love of Christ to all will be a legacy long carried on through the mobility carts he envisioned when he first saw the crippled woman in Africa with a baby on her back crawling on the ground. In the following excerpt from Mercy in Motion, Larry tells the story.
This video is a longer version of the 5-minute one on the Home page. It has extended footage of Mobility Carts overseas and of volunteers at the Penney Farms affiliate.
The PET Song, music with a slide-show presentation, was posted to YouTube in October 2009. The song itself is catchy and tells the story of PETs, or Mobility Carts as they have been known since 2016. Dr. Roger Hofmeister, a retired physician and still on the national board of Mobility Worldwide in 2020, wrote the words and music to the song in 2006. His friend, Dr. Jack Allison, recorded it in 2009, and Susan Williams, a volunteer and board member for Columbia, MO, and her son Brett, added a slide show to the song and posted it to YouTube.
Wheels of Life was produced by Venture International, a distribution partner with a mission in Kyrgyzstan. In January 2009, 140 adult and 22 small PETs were shipped from Penney Farms, Florida. This 12-minute video tells the story of their delivery to folks in Kyrgyzstan. Note that since 2016, PETs (Personal Energy Transportation) are more officially known as “Mobility Carts.”
All of the following Mercy in Motion videos were filmed in Viet Nam with Columbia, Missouri, the target affiliate. When the first PETs (Personal Energy Transportation) were made in Columbia in 1994, it was called The PET Project. Since 2016, PET is doing business as Mobility Worldwide. Further, there may be some things in these videos that have changed in the intervening years, e.g. the design of the carts is constantly being improved, including the brake system. And importation rules have eliminated filling extra space in the cartons with used clothes and other items. Today, in 2020, there are 24 affiliates including Penney Farms, FL, which began in 2001, and Sierra Leone and Zambia in Africa.
All of the following Mercy in Motion videos were produced in Viet Nam by Sarah Hill, newscaster, and Scott Schaefer, videographer, for KOMU-TV, Channel 8, in Columbia, MO. The overview video has excerpts from the other four. There is dialogue in it by co-founders Mel West and Larry Hills; Earl Miner, the PET designer; and volunteer and national board member, Dr. Roger Hofmeister, composer of The PET Song above.
The four following videos, Mercy in Motion Parts 1–4, are expanded versions of the Mercy in Motion Overview (above). They were part of “Sarah’s Stories” told on radio station KOMU-TV, Channel 8, in Columbia, MO, in 2007.
PET Florida
P.O. Box 919
Penney Farms, FL 32079
Phone: 904-284-5495
Email: PETPFMW@gmail.com
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