Can I “Help”?
It was the end of one more day of
classes… all day talking about the many distorted “truths” about disability and
one of the students, a young lady comes to me and say “what can I do? I feel so
small, so impotent. I do not feel like anything I am able to do can make a real
difference!”
She was visibly frustrated. During
the classes she started to understand that a great part of the social
oppression felt by people who experience disability is avoidable and is created
mainly by our actions, the supposedly “abled”, “independent”, “autonomous” and
“productive” citizens. “Well, I do understand your frustration, but if you
start to understand your responsibility in the situation of exclusion of people
who are “different” (and starting e.g. with the connotation of the language we
use to talk about disability), then you are already helping. And if you can
change your attitude and start seeing every person who we call disabled as a
person who deserves exactly the same respect as you, then you are already
helping. And if you with your example are able to influence some other people
to change their attitudes as well, then your help will be even more decisive.”
Actually, I do not know how can we
“help” to make things different so that every single human being born in this
world have the same opportunity to live fulfilling lives. I do not have a
perfectly planned infallible strategy, but I have to believe that somehow we
can discover ways to make things better.
When I started to be interested in
“special populations”, I started with the arrogance of someone who wanted to
“help”, because I thought that I was perhaps more empowered than them to do so,
because I was “abled”. I did not understood by then, as I understand now that
wanting to “help” people can be, depending on how we understand “help”, really
counterproductive. People do not need our
“help” if that help means that we consider them to be pitiful creatures, whose
quality of life depends on our benevolence, the more “normal” and “empowered”
people. If “helping” people means to continue believing that they are second
class citizens who are unable to be productive, contributing citizens then this
help does nothing more than reinforcing stereotypes.
“Helping” people in this way make
us feel good about ourselves, we see ourselves as “good” people. And other see
ourselves as good people. And, most of the times, the people we help see us as
good people as well. But not all, luckily!
One day, at the end of one more
Sitting Volleyball tournament, Asam, one of my team mates, one leg amputee, was
struggling to carry his bag and to use his crutches. I naturally asked him if
he needed some help. “I don’t, no. Why? Do you?” he responds, clearly upset. It
did not took me long to recover from my bruised ego to understand that Asam and
other people who possess a clear impairment have been asked thousands of time
if they needed help and almost never been asked for help. What are we saying to
people when we constantly offer help? We tell them we do not believe that they
are able to take care of themselves, that they are not able to survive well
without us! We tell them that they should appreciated our offer, even if that
offer is born out of very low expectations that we have placed upon them.
I understood by then clearly that
“helping” people with impairments or/and who have experienced disability needs
to be redefined in a way that translates our deepest belief in the right of
every human beings to explore and realise their full potential. I knew by then
that, to truly help, I needed to dig deep into the source of their social
discrimination. We cannot actively discriminate some people in the access to
education, work, leisure, movement activities (some other day I will explain
why movement is so important!), be the creators of their dependency, inadequacy
and inferiority and present ourselves as they saviours afterwards.
So, how can I, my student and all
of us truly “help”?
The answer is both simple in
essence and complex in its application. We need to look at ourselves, our
everyday life behaviours, thoughts, attitudes and believes and realise how by
choosing to be unreflective and arrogant, we worsen the unavoidable
consequences of impairment. How we do not give people space to speak up, to be
as they are, with no need to “hide” their impairment and their fragilities,
just because we are too frighten to admit our own vulnerability. In other
words, we need to understand that a great part of the “burden” of living with
impairment is avoidable; it is socially imposed by society’s passion for youth,
power, a very limited notion of human physicality and human glamour.
It is imposed by our refusal in
accepting our true nature as deeply perishable beings. We refuse to accept that
we are fragile beings, whose bodies decay and die every day. We do not want to
confront the ultimate truth of our weakness and mortality and this is why we
make everything we can to not see, to hide, to keep people who blatantly remind
us of our true nature in the shadows: “different” people, the elderly, people
with impairments and so on. We like to think of the human race as a race of
models, beautiful, athletic, invincible, whose beauty is immortal! Perhaps it
is time to just accept that we are as we are and embracing it! After a serious
injury who kept me from doing what I thought I was going to do all my life
(play volleyball obsessively) I became much more in tune with the limitations
of my body and much more available to understand and accept others’
limitations. Understanding that our bodies are vulnerable, perishable and
fragile we also understand that we our bodies can assume different forms and
shapes, that we deal and manage our vulnerabilities and that we find a way to
live well in the acceptance that our body is not a perfect expression of the human
archetype, which exists solely in our delusional mind. From this understanding,
we will come to terms with the fact that there is not “WE” and “THEM”, that we
are all the same, and that we are all different. That precisely in being
somehow “different” lays our moral sameness.
This change of mind frame will
change everything. I will not “help” anyone. I will exercise my moral duty in
making sure that the world is a place where our basic and deepest human nature
can be accommodated. It is my duty to make everything I can to end social
injustice, discrimination, and level the opportunities for everyone to be truly
human and live with dignity. I will also not see anyone, even people who are
severely impaired with pity, as inferior beings in need of my charitable
“help”, but I will see them as images of myself, of my true nature. And I will
relate with them out of unlimited compassion, as someone whose suffering
matters to me, because we are the same and we are together in our journey as
“vulnerable” human beings. When I “help” out of pity, I am stating that the
other is inferior, when I act out of compassion, I am simply saying that we are
the same, that the “help” I am giving comforts me and that I realise that one
day I will be the one in need of help and of other’s compassion.
When we understand our own
responsibility in creating the oppression of some people, we will also be in a
better position to counteract this state of affairs, to stop doing it, and feel
obliged to make amendments. We will not try to help the person, but doing
everything we can so that the person does not need our “help”. This is what I
am fighting now. I wish to create a world where people with impairments do not
need my help in things that are consensually important for our human lives,
such as being able to plan our own lives, choose where to be and with whom, be
able to have a job and contribute actively for the common good of my community,
among others.
In sum, the first step to really
help is to understand to what extent we create ourselves the oppression of
people with impairments. And after that, we need to acknowledge our fundamental sameness, that between me and those people I want to help, there is no substantial difference,
that helping them is helping me, that we are all part of a great chain of
being, from which no human being can ever be separated. Understand everyone as
an extension of myself abolishes he power hierarchy generated between me and
Asam, the “helper” and the “helpee”. In these terms, fighting so that every
single human being has similar conditions to live a fulfilling life is not an
option that should be reserved to when or if we feel altruistic, benevolent or
particularly charitable. To take care of each other cannot be an option. It
should be the essence of being “rational” human beings. At least this is the
world I want to live in, and this is the world that I want to contribute for.
I want to help making people realise that
people with impairments are not only recipients for our help, but that they can
themselves contribute in a vast array of ways for the common wellbeing, given
the opportunity to do so.
The issue of help is extremely
important in dealing professionally or personally with people who we would
immediately acknowledge as being in need of help. The purpose of this text is
to alert to the fact that our will to help can sometimes do greater harm than
good. There is a vast array of professionals who have been growing their
“business” out of the need of people with impairments, therefore it is in their
best interest to perpetuate a relation of co-dependency. Professionals of
movement, unless they fully embrace their commitment toward goals of
self-determination and empowerment can fall into the same trap! We need to be
attentive, to be very attentive. As David Howe said in one the last EUCAPA
conferences, in Ireland, 2012, we need to doubt constantly of what we know, we
need to make the familiar strange, so that we can understand the surreptitious
ways in which our action can reinforce dependency and hinder self-determination
of our public. We need to fully embrace the goal of give people the tools for
them to decide, act, refuse our help whenever they want to and equally
contribute for the other’s well-being in their own terms.
One British SV player playing
outside the sport's hall on a tournament day, January 2011 (my photo)
In the end, I did not help Asam to
carry his bag, and perhaps in a slightly harsh manner he educate me to better
respect him and other people with impairments. So, I would say to you what I
have said to my student… please do your work, and do your work well, it is your
obligation to create opportunities for everybody to enjoy movement
activities. We do not need to “help”
more than that. It is everybody’s right
to enjoy physical activity in a safe and enjoyable manner. It is our obligation
to create conditions for that to happen!