Disability: Seeing it through my eyes.

Disability, a word which is often looked upon as a stigma.

Many people will turn to involuntarily flinch or react when confronted with someone living with a disability.

This tendency is rather rampant and more so where I come from, in Africa.

Over the past  months I have been seriously pondering on this word or situation, being disabled or better still living with a disability and wondering why it is still so hard for those without a disability to comprehend and empathize  with those living with it.

My understanding finally got clearer after I went through a hip replacement surgery and found my self unable to walk for months. After depending on others for my every need, I then understood what many who always seem to behave as if living with a  disability is curse do not get. They have not had a chance to see this situation through their own eyes. To put themselves  in the shoes of the person living with it. They have not yet understood that all what a person with a disability aspires for is to live life with dignity.

As I went through the days of re-education, I started understanding first of all the frustration that a person living with a disability may face and which will need for others to understand them. The first one is that feeling of being different.

When I woke out of my anesthesia induced sleep, I was embraced by the feeling that I was different, not just from the pain I felt, but from the first thing I could not do, that is be able to move. That absence of ability to move from my waist downward came as a shock to me. I felt apart from the  others and each time I had to ask for help to do those things which I knew and my brain told me are things that everyone has to be able to do by themselves, like walk, go get a shower, get dressed, use the toilet, that feeling of being different only increased. The respite in my case was that the members of my family and the medical staff who were there to help me kept reminding me to be patient and that it was just for a while. But then I imagined how this would be for a person without this kind of hope, hope that this would be just for while.

The second thing I felt during this long months of momentarily disability,  was the sense of losing my self dignity. You can all imagine what it is like for a adult woman to be bathed by someone else, to be dressed up by someone else, even for someone who had been able to that by herself and who knows she will be able to to it by herself soon, it did not stop that awkward feeling of loosing some of my dignity or should I call it privacy. So, I got thinking and I was like, so this is what people living with a disability feel, when the lack of a wheel chair ramp or disability sensitive infrastructure pushes them to loose the little bit of dignity they have, by having to crawl to access a building or be carried by someone else.

I will not recount here all the things I felt but one thing that remained is the sense of awakening I got. To see disability through my eyes, feel it, live it, sense some of the things persons living with it go through, and I understood one thing. We often take for granted the fact that we are strong or healthy, and all, and we fail to imagine just for a fragment of a second if we were in the shoes of those whom we consider different, bizarre, disabled as we sometimes call them. We fail to think of how we will feel if in their shoes, how we would also want to be helped not by being forced to loose our dignities but by being provided services and opportunities that permit us to better adapt to the life we have and the situations that comes with it. I learnt to understand how important things which someone with two healthy legs, or good eyesight, or speech or in full physical health will consider banal, are for a person with a wheel chair or crutches  or speech or sight impairment, like a wheel chair ramp, an elevator, public transportation which are  designed  to be accessed by all, information notices in public places which are displayed in ways that can be read, seen, heard by all.

Then I realized this is what is needed for everyone to fully understand people living with a disability. To see it through our own eyes. For policy makers to see it, feel it, live it so that they can better understand why all the fuss as some would say for disability friendly services in public offices, for laws that guarantee certain rights and privileges for persons living with disabilities, for the public to understand, accept, support and respect persons living with any form of a disability. It is only when we do this I think, that we will understand the full scope of what it means being unable to do what is considered normal by norms of human society, to understand what is means to live with a disability in all its entirety and complexity.