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. 

Alguns direitos reservados James Mackintosh Photography @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/59207552@N08/7870735914/

 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! 

Movement is life!

I love movement! I always have! Though culturally it was not expected from me that I liked so much to be active, play sports, climbing trees and so on... moving, freely... dancing at the rain or jumping over waves, chasing cats or playing to make friends... I always loved to move. I love to move, I love to feel my body moving and I love to move in a dance with other moving bodies... I conquer my space in the world, I am here, I am me and I am alive. I am visible for others and I am visible to myself. I can do things, I can act, I can act and produce an effect in the world that surrounds me. But, most of all, it was in moving that I always found myself closest to what happiness can be. The type of happiness that does not announce itself! In moving, especially when I was playing volleyball at my favourite beach, I was fully happy! Me, the court, my partner and the opponents, we were a unit! A unit of wholeness and purpose, which dissolved at the end of the game, but during the magic moment of the match we were all fundamental elements of a wholeness that fulfilled our senses, minds and souls!

I can understand that many people may not share the same passion for movement that I do. That is perfectly understandable and acceptable. But I also know that there are many other people who simply did not have the opportunity to discover the joy of movement, or that, having had that opportunity could not develop it further. Dis/Ability is a case in point. Dis/Ability, purposely separated to denounce the insufficiency of any definition, challenges many many things in the way we think about our humanity and the duty of care that should bound every human being.

 In my case, I would like to contribute for everybody to experience similar happiness to the one I have experienced in my experiences of sport, dancing and exploring movement! Everybody, even the ones who perhaps too quickly we would say cannot move…

Anabela Pombeiro (left) and me (right). Wonderful times on the summer of 2009!

 

 I am creating this blog to keep this passion alive, to channel my voice in the world, to build a small niche where perhaps I can make some difference and initiate dialogue with other voices who have similar purposes or who feel discriminated in their opportunities to move. My favourite terrain is sport’s world and I hope I will be commenting and reflecting on a wide variety of issues, events, discussion that I assess as important to make of sport and other movement activities an instrument of social justice and   human development!

This blog is also an open and sincere invitation for dialogue. I would love to hear about your experiences of movement, ideas, stories connected with the broad goal of using sport and movement activities as tools for social justice and human development! Perhaps some other day, I need to explain what I understand by these! But for today, it is just the birth of a very personal project!

Playing for Lincoln Imps, 2010/2011 season against the national team of Canada.