Keynote Speech at the Disability and the Majority World Conference

By Myroslava Tataryn
July 8, 2011

The following speech was delivered by AIDS-Free World Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn as a keynote at the Disability and the Majority World Conference held at Manchester Metropolitan University in Manchester, England.

Thank you, Shaun, for this opportunity to speak.

Now, I know that I said I would speak about AIDS, Power and Politics but, actually, today I’m just going to talk about relationships. AIDS, Power, Politics...dealing with each of these and all of these boils down to relationships.

In order to explain how, I would like to share a bit of my own history with you. I would like to tell you a bit about my first experience living outside Canada. I did not spend a gap-year in Europe...rather, as a student of development studies and environmental science I embarked on a year of studying abroad in Ghana.

I was not a disability activist. I was an environmental activist — committed to student organizing throughout secondary school and into my undergraduate years. Yes, I had a congenital condition that meant I had lived with a disability all my life. I trained and competed in wheelchair sports throughout secondary school and spoke out about issues of injustice, inappropriate language, exclusion but I didn’t see myself a disability activist. I was an environmentalist (and would love to continue to be, but with the amount of carbon miles I’ve incurred in the past few years, I’m afraid I can’t really claim that label).

In any case, I arrived in Ghana for the beginning of my 3rd year of undergraduate studies. I moved in with a Ghanaian family upon my arrival and was determined to listen and to learn that year. I was interested in traditional medicine, herbalists and village healers. Or so I thought...but what struck me was that in the first couple of weeks the only disabled people I saw were on the side of the road begging. So, sure, in the day time in lectures I was pondering community projects and post-­colonial theories but on my way home I was wondering if that’s the corner I would be sitting on if I had been born in Ghana. Was begging the only option? Before too long, I met some musicians practicing under a tree outside the gates of the University of Legon (in Accra). I loved the music and would sit under a nearby tree listening to them on my way home from lectures. Many of the musicians seemed to be more or less my age, and one of them had a visible mobility impairment, having had polio at a young age. This was my first glimpse...that, no, even here begging was not the only option.

So, months went by and I moved up to Tamale in Northern Ghana where we were to begin a sort of 4-­month volunteer placement or work-­experience after which we would write a paper and present on our experiences to gain credit for this portion of the course. I wasn’t planning on working on disability rights. But, during my course-­work, I had come across the Resource Centre for People with Disabilities in Tamale (which, at the time, was funded by UK-based Action on Disability and Development). I was surprised and delighted when the chairperson of the resource centre asked if I would spend my 4-­months with them. Of course I agreed! My other Canadian classmates had to almost beg to be accepted at other agencies and here I was being invited. I was grateful.

Soon upon my arrival at the Centre, the people who worked and spent time at the resource centre told me that they had never met a “white disabled” before. Now, I bring this up not to make my Ghanaian colleagues at the Centre seem backwards or uneducated but rather to just remind us of who it is that we (in the west) usually send on international placements. Where I was in Tamale was far from the capital, a city but in a very rural region. Goats and cattle in the streets with bicycles weaving between. The Canadians (and other foreigners) that show up there from overseas are, for the most part: young, white, well-­educated, non-­disabled. Not quite representative of the cultural, linguistic, racial and other diversity that I encounter in Canadian towns and cities.

To be honest, when I started coming to the Resource Centre on a daily basis, I felt I didn’t do much real work — sure I helped refine some funding proposals, helped plan a few events, went to pick up the post...but mostly I just had long conversations. People wanted to know what it was like being disabled where I came from. Probably the most common question was if I was married and if...in our place, it was also difficult for a disabled woman to find a husband. We talked about husbands, wives, boyfriends and children...you see? Relationships! We talked about the struggles families with disabled children face.