KENYA: Disability Is Not Inability
In the US, people with physical disabilities focus on fighting stigma, on being viewed as people who can do almost anything despite of their physical limitations, and on fighting for the world to make appropriate accommodations in order to even the playing field.
In Kenya, like so many low-income countries, people with physical disabilities, children in particular, are fighting for their very survival.
A friend, who runs a school for the disabled here, recently told me an illustrative story. The man who founded the school was visiting a friend in a rural area and came across a disabled child who was tied to a tree while his parents went to work in the field. The boy was left with a bowl of food and forced to defecate in the radius rope permitted. The school founder, touched by this scene, made it his life’s work to make lives better and futures brighter for these children. (more…)
Mama Mzungu (Kenya)
Originally from Chicago, Kim has dabbled in world travel through her 20s and is finally realizing her dream of living and working in Western Kenya with her husband and two small boys, Caleb and Emmet. She writes about tension of looking at what the family left in the US and feeling like they live a relatively simple life, and then looking at their neighbors and feeling embarrassed by their riches. She writes about clumsily navigating the inevitable cultural differences and learning every day that we share more than we don’t. Come visit her at Mama Mzungu.
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