He is My Hero

He was half a man. I don’t mean this as a philosophical judgment, just pure physical observation. His torso seem shrunken in at the middle, his limbs half formed and twisted, his legs small and eternally folded, his arms pulled and buckled at the elbows and wrists. When I caught a brief look of him around the corner, pulling himself up the stairs with his elbows and dragging his leg stubs, I immediately assumed an awkward situation was soon to follow. He would probably want money, or would get stuck upstairs in the university hall and someone would have to carry him out, or he would cause a scene… this has happened before with other people wandering in: street boys coming into my lecture pedir-ing for candies and monies, a crazy drunk man who claimed to be some father figure of mine, school kids shrieking and running down the hall…oh the thrill of stealing erasers from the university classrooms (!), other school kids sneaking up to sometimes use the bathrooms or more frequently to play and pee on things that are not the urinals (two bathrooms for 1 primary school, 1 secondary school, 1 industrial school, 1 teacher training school, and 1 university… except the bathroom is on university part of the facilities), full grown men asking for any odd jobs…. It really isn’t unusual to see interesting characters, though less so now that we have a guard.

The lady walking up the stairs with me maybe was thinking the same thing, as we passed him, when she asked him nicely, politely: “What are you doing up here?”
“I’m here to matriculate.”
“… At UCM….?”
“Yes, I am here to matriculate at UCM.”
He was articulate, un-offended, professional, and as we came up on him I could see he was holding a document pouch, he was ready, prepared, and just like any other student. It was just a bit harder for him to get upstairs to the offices.

It made me think of an interaction I had a couple weeks ago. An American entrepreneur generously showed me his community health project that he has been developing, it was really interesting to see … I wouldn’t even know where to start if I wanted to start something like that and they have accomplished an incredible amount of work in a short amount of time. When I was there, I went with them to deliver clothes to a man with paralyzed legs living in the bairro. This man lives alone, in a mud hut off the main road. His yard was neatly swept but the inside of his house was humbling.

As we were leaving, I asked something along the lines of does he get out often, or what does he do. My question was answered with surprise/shock: He’s paralyzed, he can’t go anywhere. I felt a bit bad. Oh yeah, of course, how could I ask such an insensitive and thoughtless question.

. .. but wait … maybe my question wasn’t so thoughtless but in more of a subconscious way. I absolutely say this not to demean the challenges facing people in any way (this is an uncomfortable topic but I’m not that insensitive), but every day when I go to work I see people around town, mobile despite predisposition for immobility: scooting on cardboard, or being carried to the spot where they shine and repair shoes, or making a daily journey from downtown to outside Shoprite and back again by crawling, or that man literally pulling himself up a flight of stairs to register for classes at the university.

Certain norms that I might have unconsciously had about capability and resiliency have shifted: a lesson for me in being supportive and sensitive of challenges but not being too presumptuous about limitations.