Ecuadorian vice president-elect Lenin Moreno says he discovered the analgesic effects of humor while recovering from a robber's bullet.
Now, Ecuador's leading practitioner of "laugh therapy" says he plans to tickle the nation's collective funny bone to ease its deep political divide and draw attention to its most marginalized people.
Nine years ago, Moreno was driving to a store to buy bread when a carjacker's bullet entered his spine and paralyzed him from the waist down. He was confined to a wheelchair and the doctors could do nothing to stop the excruciating pain.
"Frankly, I would have preferred to die until I happened upon humor," Moreno said in the he and president-elect Rafael Correa set up for the transition to the Government Palace on Jan. 15.
It was a funny comment from a friend four years ago that made him realize laughter made the pain go away.
"There was an analgesic effect for a moment, but in that moment I found a path and I started to study humor profoundly," he said.
Since then, Moreno has authored a number of books like Smile, Don't be Ill, and offered motivational conferences, including a joint presentation in Quito last June with Hunter "Patch" Adams -- whose clownish behavior was made famous in a 1998 Robin Williams movie.
But until Correa invited him to join his radical reform ticket, Moreno's political experience was limited to a few months as director of Ecuador's National Council for the Handicapped during the 2000 to 2002 government of Gustavo Noboa.
Now as vice president-elect, the 53-year-old Moreno says he will be in charge of national modernization, attention to vulnerable members of Ecuadorian society and scientific research and development.
In that role, he wants to communicate the importance of humor to employees of Ecuador's state bureaucracy to improve productivity and the quality of service to the public.
"I understand that Rafael chose me for my sense of humor -- to inject it into the new administration," Moreno said. "I am a symbol of the attention that will be given to the most neglected sectors of society."
Ecuador's handicapped pay half for public and many private services. But laws protecting their rights are few and poorly enforced.
Ecuador has yet to fully implement regulations mandating preferential parking, cutaways in sidewalks and accessibility ramps in hospitals, malls, airports and universities.
That didn't keep Moreno off the campaign trail, however.
"More than once, someone said a handicapped person couldn't campaign and I did it," Moreno said. "I crisscrossed the country twice, I got into the mud, into canoes that went down the Napo River."
He tried to keep his humor evident on the stump, directing his jokes at the opposing candidate Alvaro Noboa, a Bible-toting banana tycoon who called himself "God's messenger."
"He would say he was `sent by God,'" Moreno said. "So I would say that I had spoken to God and he told me that, yes, God had sent him here because they couldn't stand him up there."
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