Educate Yourself! : Disabilities in Ethiopia

In a Place where Disabled and Unable are Often Seen as Equivalents

 by Danielle Luttrull

A mentally-ill man, every time he sees our friend, runs up to her and slams his first down on her shoulder. In the same town, another man masturbates in public, on the street. Another friend reports having had her plate of food snatched from her at a restaurant from an old naked woman who ran in. One volunteer was chased daily by the town’s “crazy person,” who would cross the street to get to her, throwing large rocks at her as she ran from him. In our town, there’s a man—always adorned with a bright scarf bearing the colors of the Ethiopian flag—in a makeshift wheelchair; every time he sees us, he angrily screams unintelligible English at us in his loudest, most threatening voice. Every week it’s the same: we greet him calmly back (though loudly, so he can hear us over his own screams) in Tigrigna, and his anger disappears, his voice lowers, he greets us back, warmly. There’s another young man with great English, who often stops us to give the same heated speech about our responsibility to buy him and others passports. He always picks up exactly where he left off in his eternal argument—as if the conversation we ended almost a month earlier was only two minutes ago—once even running to stop our bajaj taxi and give us the pitch through the window.

We have a friend, Zyenah, a young student at one of my schools, who has intellectual disabilities. In the states he would be enrolled in a Special Education class. Here, he sits in the same classroom as all 40 plus of his peers, the teacher unable or unwilling to give him any extra attention. I was speaking with him on the school grounds between classes one day last year, when a teacher hurried over to us, to quickly “apologize” to me. The teacher put his index finger to his temple and spun his hand around—the cruel way we used to signify “crazy” among grade-school friends in the 90s. “He is not right,” the teacher assured me. He makes an ugly face and shrugs. “This one is not normal.”

God forbid the foreign visitor think for an instant that all his students are “this way.”

I observed one teacher who gave sign language translations to her four deaf students, juxtaposed with her teaching in English to the rest of the class. She came to me mid-lecture to explain, “These are deaf,” pointing with her finger at the girls beside me. “But she—she is crazy,” pointing to a girl a few feet from us, and snatching her notebook from her, to show me the indecipherable markings on each page, as if I were on tour, and this girl the subject. I quickly wondered how different her life would be in America, surrounded by teachers who love her in the caring environment of a Special Education classroom, instead of this place where no one understands her, and little help is available.

Those with intellectual disabilities are considered a nuisance, a blemish. The mentally-ill are forgotten, left to their fate.

It’s not that mental illness necessarily abounds—maybe it’s even less common than in our own towns in America—but here, they have no respite. No medical help. No medication or rehabilitation opportunities. No centers or hospitals to treat their treatable illness. They’re left to fend for themselves, often on the streets, alone. Their neighbors and communities often ignore their rock-throwing and public-masturbating and nakedness, with a fatalistic approach that there is no way they can be helped. They are doomed—they are “not right”—and always will be. Most everyone just sits back and watches.

Blindness definitely abounds. I grew up with a blind aunt, and she was the only blind person I knew until college. Here, we have three close friends who are blind, and daily, I may pass three to five visually-impaired people, guiding themselves down our uneven road with their walking sticks.

Our visually-impaired guard Gebre Michael tells us his blindness began as a pain that eventually became Glaucoma. Seemingly insignificant pains or infections are ignored until they’re irreparable, because of the cost of medical assistance and medicine. Impoverished people just avoid getting “minor inconveniences” checked out; it’s too expensive for them. (Our neighbor recently borrowed money from us to buy expensive eye drops; it cost 50 birr, or $2.50.)

Instead of taking their child to a doctor when she has an infected eye, the parents will make a cut with a razor, just beside the eye, to let out the bad, infected blood. This doesn’t work.

I work at a private boarding school for the visually-impaired, teaching English every Thursday—often through music—and it breaks my heart to see the scars on their temples, to imagine their parents’ concern years ago when letting the bad blood out of their five-year-old’s eyes wasn’t helping.

To make matters worse, there’s a traditional myth that the blind are cursed by God. They are sinners whom God has decided to punish with blindness. Though we haven’t seen this in Adwa, in some towns, the blind are not aided or helped, but instead targets for ridicule and rock-throwing.

There’s a stigma and belief that people with disabilities are disabled, and hence, unable. That there are some things they just aren’t capable of. I once saw Teacher Haymanot (whose name means Religion) escort a blind student from her classroom, seating him on the stoop outside the class.

“Why is he leaving class to sit here?” I asked her.

“It is Mathematics now,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“And?...So why did he leave class?”

“It is not possible. I write Mathematics on the board, and he cannot see the board. He does not participate in Mathematics.”

My jaw fell. “But he can listen! He can’t see the board in the other subjects either.”

“But he cannot see. In Mathematics, you must see the numbers.”

Because of the laziness and narrow-mindedness of others, Dawit isn’t even given the chance to participate, but is instead physically removed from the presence of the other learners. He is quickly ushered out of his teacher’s sight—and responsibility.

There’s a theme with ailments, disabilities and medicine here: the minor goes unnoticed or ignored or poorly treated, and becomes major.

Sister Agnes, a sister from South Korea at our church in town, has a bone in her wrist protruding her skin outwards. This is because she broke it here in Ethiopia, and it was set incorrectly. One self-motivated volunteer from Arizona, who comes to Adwa every year to offer free and well-needed construction services, recently fell off a building he was working on, breaking his leg. He wisely refused to get the bone set here, and so suffered the 16-plus-hour flight back to America in pain, on a commercial flight with little leg room, so he could get the bone set properly.

We see countless people with leg limps whose cause could’ve just been an easy bone break in childhood that wasn’t properly treated.

Daily we see victims of what was probably Polio, balancing on their sticks, swinging their good legs forward, to walk down the street. Several amputees with their canes and crutches. Many women have goiters jutting out from their necks, the size of softballs, because of lack of iodine.

It’s incomprehensible to us. The lack of medicine to prevent the preventable, the lack of expertise to treat the treatable, the lack of awareness to see people with disabilities as just as capable and worthy and good as the average person of full health.

This may be the most devastating part of living in a developing nation.

And what can be done? What is being done?

Here are some organizations and doctors who are treating the treatable, and in the process, immensely improving their patients’ quality of life:

Operation Smile is one organization that is making a difference in Ethiopia, as they repair the facial deformities of children.

Here you can watch an incredible documentary online, called "A Walk to Beautiful" about Obstetric Fistula, and the brave journeys of five women who travel by foot to the capital, home of the hospital able to treat their condition. Their condition is the source of their ostracism from their communities and families—failed childbirth, sometimes as a result of being married off and conceiving at too premature an age, has left them unable to control their own urination. To their husbands, to their family and neighbors, they’ve become something “other,” locked in separate rooms so the smell surrounding them doesn’t inconvenience others. Desperate and hopeful, they begin their long separate journeys to healing.