The Disability Culture... According to Kate

As a future occupational therapist, I will be working with people with all types of disabilities who will view their situation different than I will view it. If anything else, this trip has helped me broaden my understanding of disability, cultural differences, and has given me the opportunity to step outside of my own thinking for a second and see things from a different perspective. But I’m getting a head of myself…

One of the main goals of our trip was to learn what ‘disability’ means to a developing country in general and to Ghana in particular. During our time in country we talked with people who have disabilities, toured facilities that serve people with disabilities, and interviewed community members about their perspective of disability. We also spent a lot of time observing the culture and attempted to figure out the resources available for someone with a disability and the means in which they can access these resources. The latter resulted in confusion, frustration, and a bit of a helpless feeling. Let me explain.

We met a man named Enok who had been given a bad polio vaccination and as a result had weakness and deformity in his lower extremities. He moves about the community in a wheelchair/hand bike device and begs for his earnings to provide for his family. Although he is in fact providing for them in this manor, it is his hope to one day learn to make clothing and work as a seamstress in a shop. This is a great goal but here’s the problem. Disability in Ghana is not seen too favorably. We found that some people saw having a disability as a curse from God for something that they or their family had done wrong. This resulted in a huge stigma against people with disability to the point that there is the belief that if the community finds out you have a child with a disability they may not come to your shop any longer. Some of these children are, consequently, put in back rooms and hidden from society. There is also the belief that it is a result of a bad vaccination or injury. In these cases, the individuals are not hidden from society necessarily. Some of these children make it into special schools or sent away to a boarding school specializing in working with children with disabilities. Because of these beliefs, people with disability are not given the chance to take on apprenticeship positions with in trade fields. Enok would have a hard time training to be a seamstress in someone’s shop. After training he would then have to have enough money to start up his own shop, buy supplies, and lastly, get customers. If people won’t go to your shop if they know you have a child with a disability, what is the likelihood they will go to a shop run by a man with a disability. I still have a lot to learn about the disability culture in Ghana but this has left me frustrated and feeling helpless. How do you give a man some skills to be independent and then send him into an environment that doesn’t accept him? This seems bigger than I am. There is more to learn.