Saturday was a special day at ENGAGE. For the first time in our lives I and my colleague Kusum played a wheelchair basketball game. You might think better late than never especially when you work for an organization promoting sport as an approach to empower youths living with disabilities. Indeed we are already planning to make up for the time lost by at least playing once in a month from now onwards.
As soon as we sat in the wheelchairs and we started playing, we felt a sense of liberation. At the beginning both of us were a bit hesitant, uncomfortable trying to run here and there in a basketball court by means of a wheelchair. Slowly we started enjoying it and we tried our best to play by the rules even if, by far, we were the worst players on the court.
Saturday was not only special because of our game. It was indeed an important day as we had a very serious conversation with the PK College wheelchair basketball team about the future course of our program; it was special because we had scheduled a meeting with Sundevi, the financial manager of THIS, a local NGO working in the field of child protection.
Sundevi was interested in becoming an ENGAGE Talent Coach, our new volunteering program supporting our beneficiaries, all youths living with disabilities, in reaching their personal and professional goals. Saturday was also special because we were supposed go to Jorpati to sign a partnership agreement with the Nepal Spinal Injury Sport Association, NSCISA, with whom we are working to promote disability sport.
It seems that Saturday would have been a “never ending” day as at 5pm we were had to attend a Friends of ENGAGE meeting at Black Pepper where we would have listened new ideas about helping ENGAGE raise money and gain more visibility.
Probably it could have been one of the busiest Saturday at ENGAGE. I was really looking forward to all these events, driven by the passion and commitment to develop ENGAGE as an effective, impactful organization.
I am very lucky to say that Kusum, who is increasingly taking up more and more ownership and leadership at ENGAGE, shares the same my passion and determination.
Therefore both of us were quite thrilled about all day events. Saturday was supposed to be a memorable day for ENGAGE and we were all ready for it.
At the end of the wheelchair basketball game, we met Sundevi. We decided to have a coffee in a nearby local restaurant located few minutes away from PK College, in Putalisadak.
We were almost done with the meeting when the earthquake struck. We were never in a real dangerous situation even though the restaurant was in an old house. After staying in the middle of the street for almost an hour, we decided to go back to PK College to wait and see.
Hundreds of students preparing for their upcoming academic year were also gathered there on the ground. Few people were panicking but overall the situation was calm. Immediately I started thinking about our friends, the players who had just left the court when we went to have a coffee with Sundevi but I had no answer nor any idea about what to do.
Around five o clocks we decided it was wise to go home. It has been a long day, a day of fear but also a day where we could lay down on the grass to chat, lough and appreciate the sun. You fight fear by pretending everything is all right.
In the same hours, while we were experiencing the atmospheres of a mass pic nic, thousands of people have already died and many others were still trapped in the rubbles. Call this a tragic irony.
Fast forward. Today is Tuesday morning. As many people have already commented, the earthquake proved the great level of reliance of Nepali people. On Saturday evening, reaching home after a long walk, I found all our neighbors under simple, improvised but well effective tents.
Everywhere local communities got organized by themselves. Call it “community organizing”, one of the greatest assets mastered by Nepali.
Certainly these kinds of situations help you looking around you with different eyes. I did not only spend two pleasant days, reading a lot but most importantly I had the chance to meet and know the people I ignored for almost two years.
Yet suddenly on Sunday my thinking was on our players and volunteers. I tried to contact few of them by phone.
I could not reach out Kusum but I knew she was all right with her family but I had managed to contact our colleague Pragya and learned she was safe. Yet I had no ideas about the others. My particular concern was for the players, all wheelchair users.
Somehow maybe driven by my sense of optimism I was confident that everybody was all right but still I was concerned about their “coping” strategies. After all I and my family had the luck to share these moments with the family living down stairs. We helped each other in a true self help spirit. We came to know each other far better; our relationship is much stronger now. It is the same for thousands of people stranded in tents like ours for the last 3 days.
Surely also our friends, the players were coping and making do with the situation despite all the much greater challenges they are now facing. After all if the town is not disable friendly, hardly to think how improvised camps could be run in a disable friendly way or how the post-earthquake humanitarian interventions can “holistically” incorporate disabilities in their operations.
While there are not data yet about causalities among persons living with disabilities and certainly there are many among them, I feel that earthquake proved once again that persons living with disabilities are the toughest and strongest persons living in the country.
Against all the odds, every single day, they navigate the innumerable obstacles of inaccessible urban spaces. They are discriminated by the system in almost all aspects of life and if you think a bit, you would admit that the earthquake was “simply” a further proof of their endurance.
Every single day persons living with disabilities are showing their extreme resilience, determination and optimism to enjoy a “normal” life but what a normal life is?
Are the lives of persons living without disabilities more normal than the lives of persons with disabilities?
As for me and Kusum, despite the fact that perceptions are hard to change, the answer is that it is never too late to understand where the real truth stands.
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