My first meeting with John Foppe will forever remain vivid. A motivational speaker from Illinois, Foppe was in Chennai recently, when I met him for an interview. During the course of our conversation, Foppe asked for a glass of water. It was served in a wine goblet and I contemplated: “Should I help John with it or do I leave it to him?”
In the blink of an eye, John had picked up the goblet using his foot, and holding it between his toes, raised it to his mouth to sip. Then I realised how much I had underestimated John’s strengths.
Only a while earlier, after exchanging greetings, John had caught me off guard by extending his right foot to present me his book, “What’s your excuse”, clasped between his toes.
Born with no arms
Born on August 23, 1970, John Foppe is the fourth among eight siblings. He was born without arms. The baby needed an immediate surgery to connect his upper and lower bowel, an operation with a one-in-a–million survival rate since his abdominal cavity had become septic by then. John survived it, among several other roadblocks that he would run into in life.
His physical condition has not come in the way of his travels to more than 25 countries. Nor has it deterred him from learning skiing, pottery, basket-weaving or painting. So what if he does not have arms? John makes his bed every morning and prepares breakfast. He dresses on his own and drives a car too. At 24 he purchased his own house, a stately Queen Anne Victorian mansion. Incidentally, it happened to be the same one that his parents once had decided against buying since doctors had expressed doubts about little John being able to walk: so how would he climb stairs to the bedrooms on top? Today, climbing 32 steps is part of his daily regimen.
At 43, Foppe, who holds a masters in social work, is a successful businessman and motivational speaker. His company, Visionary Velocity Worldwide, has a clientele that includes the Miami Dolphins and Fortune 500 companies such as Boeing and GE and, outside the United States, Fortis, ST Microelectronics and UniCredit.
Married to Christine, Foppe is a proud father of a 6-year-old daughter, Teresa.
Self-reliant in more ways than you can imagine, Foppe’s awe-inspiring saga comes with lessons for many of us in resilience, perseverance and a positive approach towards life.
John fondly attributes all these qualities to the support of his family. “I had a loving and nurturing childhood,” he reminisces. “My parents provided every kind of resource and explored all kinds of options to make my life better.”
At 2, Foppe was fitted with artificial limbs, but “I found them hard, heavy and cumbersome. I resisted them.”
His brothers assisted him in putting on his pants every day and to use the bathroom. When John started going to school, he was fitted with a new pair of artificial limbs. Although it was an improvement to the earlier ones, they were still heavy and cumbersome. John put them on and took them off, often with help from his siblings.
Foppe says his parents also introduced him to Dr Harold Wilke, a widely travelled minister who was born without arms, and pointed out to him the way Dr Wilke had adapted his clothing. Wilke used elastic suspenders on his pants and wore Japanese tabi socks to enable him to manipulate items with his toes. But “I wanted to do nothing with those ideas as I was certain that these changes would make me feel different from other children at school”.
By the time he entered fifth grade, frustration and anger made Foppe defiant towards everyone. Family members and teachers were at the receiving end of his rude retorts.
Around this time, a camping trek was announced at school and Foppe excitedly asked his mother if he could attend the camp like his brothers had done before him. He certainly did not expect his mother to say, “Johnny, you can’t go to the camp.”
To his “Why?” she explained that he could not take care of himself, nor could he go to the bathroom on his own and despite their suggestions to become less reliant on others, he was not cooperating.
The following morning, when Foppe woke up, he was in for a rude shock. His brother Ron declined to help him put his clothes on as their mother had warned her sons not to assist John anymore.
Foppe recalls confronting his mother and accusing her of being mean and calling her the worst mother in the world. And that he hated her! After she left his room, he tried on his own to put on his pants.
Lying down on the floor, he put his legs into his pants and then raised his feet so that the pants fell down to his hips.
“I quickly lunged to my feet and stood with my knees pushed out, to hold up the pants. Then, finding a knob on the chest of drawers, I tried to hook the belt loops of the pants on it.”
John could not reach the knob. And his pants slid down.
He tried again, this time managing to hook his pants on a door knob. Suddenly the belt loop slipped off the knob and his pants fell to the floor.
“It was a hot May afternoon,” he recalls. “I lay on the floor, tired, frustrated and completely lonely. Looking up I saw my reflection in a mirror ahead. My tears-stained face was red. I noticed the short stubs of flesh hanging from my shoulders. At that moment I accepted that I was not going to grow new arms. In the stillness of that epiphany, I felt God’s presence all around me and I heard Him softly say, ‘If you let Me John I will help you.’”
Foppe said, “Yes.”
Over the next few days, he became willing to make the changes his parents had earlier suggested. He started wearing suspenders and Japanese tabis. His father installed a little knob at the right height so that he could use his belt loops to pull up his pants around the waist.
Did he go to the camp?
John smiles, “I did.”.
Crediting his mother for showering ‘tough love’ on him, Foppe says, “Mom had the ability to look past the pain she might be causing me at that moment and focus on the freedom that I could enjoy if I became physically independent.”
John tells me that he had called up his mother that morning from Chennai and asked her, “Did you think that I would one day be travelling around the world?”
“John, I only wanted you to learn to put your pants on that day,” answered his mother.
Finding his feet
When he was still a 6-month-old toddler, Foppe’s parents noticed him playing with a toothpick using his left foot on the dining table.
Self-taught, he graduated to picking up larger objects, soon becoming adept at using his feet.
At 16, he got his driving licence. Foppe drives using his left foot to steer and his right foot on the gas and brakes. At the seminar in Chennai, he talked about how he would joke with his mother, “Look Mom, no hands”, while driving out. On one occasion when pulled up for speeding the cop asked him for his papers. “I held out my foot clutching the licence. That’s when he realised I had no arms. He told me to slow down and let me off.”
Foppe enjoys cooking. For easy access, he stores dishes in the lower cabinets and food items on the lower racks inside the refrigerator. He eats using his toes to hold a fork or spoon. Painting is another passion that he indulges in with his feet. And, his watch, he wears on his ankle.
Haiti, the turning point
Foppe has been involved in social-welfare activities of the church since high-school days.
“I was trying to fit in and participate in several things,” Foppe explains. “That provided a venue for me to socialise.”
As president of the youth council wing, he led a team of volunteers to Haiti, where they visited a home for children.
The single-storey building was a two-room concrete bunker with a rusty tin roof. Children lay cramped on the bare floor, wrapped in tattered blankets, and the stench of urine permeated the air.
“Watching them took me back to my childhood days when as a 2-year-old I had been admitted for artificial arms. Those days my parents were not allowed to stay back at night and I remember screaming and kicking at the nurses as they left. I was lost in these thoughts and reliving the pain, anger and fear that I felt then, when something grabbed my waist.”
Looking down, Foppe noticed a little boy with his arms locked around him. The first thought that came to his mind was, the boy wants Foppe to pick him up and he doesn’t have hands to do that.
“I felt tremendously inadequate,” Foppe remembers, “And on the flight back home I lashed out to God.”
The little boy’s face kept tormenting him until, eight days later, it dawned on him that the boy did not want to be picked up but was actually hugging him.
“I had been so engrossed with my personal limitations that I had failed to recognise the simplicity and magnitude of his gift to me,” Foppe says. “He looked straight past my physical condition and totally accepted me. He gave me an extravagant gift of unconditional love. That moment I felt my real disability was in my mind and heart and not in my body. I had become absorbed in self-pity.”
Viewing the incident in a new light, Foppe wanted to take the next flight to Haiti to give the little boy a hug. But that was not possible.
The 16-year-old Foppe then decided that the best way to help the little boy was by raising awareness about the conditions in Haiti and mobilise donations. Little did he know then that he was in fact laying a foundation for his speaking career.
Over the next few days he organised seminars and presentations on the conditions in Haiti and by the end of his presidential term, Foppe’s team raised more than $8000 (Dh29,360).
His talks were always filled with personal anecdotes. Soon schools and colleges were inviting Foppe to deliver talks on developing self-esteem and overcoming challenges.
It gave him immense joy, prompting him to choose speech communication as his major subject. On one occasion he was asked to speak at a Total Quality Management seminar sponsored by the US Defence Department in Colorado.
Zig Ziglar, America’s noted motivational speaker, sitting among the audience, was impressed with Foppe’s speech and invited him to join his organisation.
After graduation, Foppe joined Ziglar’s team in Dallas.
“Zig personally trained me and helped me hone my public-speaking skills,” says Foppe, who was one among ‘Ten Outstanding Young Americans’, awarded by the US Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1993, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 from Mater Dei High School Hall of Honor. “I’ve had the opportunity to address different kinds of audience: from pastors to prisoners and from florists to defence contractors.”
This January he organised a leadership and motivation workshop for the US Air Force’s Air Mobility Squadron commanders from all over the world, helping them accept risk and do more with less.
- Mythily Ramachandran is a writer based in Chennai, India.
