A Thirst for Learning

By Diane Driedger

It’s rainy season in Trinidad but still people venture out, still people with disabilities trek to the Independent Living Centre (ILC). Here, they practise their skills on four computers that businesses have lent the group. There is a thirst for learning and an enthusiasm about the Independent Living Centre in the atmosphere.

This is but one stillframe of my recent six-week consultation in Trinidad and Tobago on behalf of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities. This is one of the programs for which we have raised funds through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The Council has worked together with the Trinidad and Tobago Chapter of Disabled Peoples’ International (DPI T&T) over the last three years to offer training programs and to set up the ILC. The ILC has been organized along lines similar to independent living centres in Canada -- they are governed and staffed by a majority of persons with disabilities. They are looking for ways to further the independence of people with disabilities through information and referral, training and peer counselling. Already, the ILC has held courses in advocacy, peer counselling and self-esteem. There has been a decided change in the disability community as a result.

When I first visited Trinidad in 1990, there was a committed core of persons with disabilities. Now, three years later, I find many persons with disabilities volunteering in the office at the Centre and participating in the training programs. The following are a few instances of independent living in people’s lives:

- Richard K. has had impaired mobility since birth. He walks with a limp and lives with his parents. He is 24 years old and a graduate of a prestigious boys’ high school. When I first met Richard three years ago, he was quiet and shy. Now he is working in the ILC office every day, answering phones, typing letters, filing and meeting the public. He tutors others on the computers at the ILC and is interested in studying computer science in the future.

- Ann D. has been living in a psychiatric hospital off and on for the last 30 years. She has been depressed at times. She wants to live in the community, having tried it several times, but her neighbours found out that she had been "in the madhouse" and forced her to move back to the institution. The stigma of mental illness is great in Trinidad and Tobago. I visited Ann at the hospital with the ILC’s program officer. The ILC is looking for ways to help "displaced" women -- women who have been institutionalized and forgotten by their families -- to move back into the community.

- The ILC classroom is full -- 25 women with disabilities have come to discuss the training programs set up to instil independence and self-esteem. On this July morning, they review the history of DisAbled Women’s Network Trinidad and Tobago. It was founded a year ago, on a September morning, when I last visited the ILC.

The women have been participating in the ILC programs -- but they want specific programs for women in educational upgrading and health maintenance. Most women with disabilities have not completed high school, due to lack of accessible schools, the attitudes of their families and lack of transportation. Several teachers have already volunteered to teach courses in accessible locations. The health maintenance program springs from a need to know more about self-care and prevention of illness. Every year, at least one person with a disability from DPI T&T dies who is still quite young. Health professionals have also volunteered to hold seminars.

- The house lights are out in the Little Carib Theatre in Port of Spain. People with disabilities are playing basketball on the stage. They are telling stories of discrimination and portraying society’s negative attitudes towards them in an hour-long play called The Zoo. It was directed by a director and actor who volunteered to work with the DPI T&T North Trinidad branch in writing and putting on the play. The play will be staged again in October and will then travel to schools across the country.

Its final scene sticks in my mind: In front of the stage, a bar had been erected for each scene of discrimination. At the end, the actors call on members of the audience to help remove the barriers that have been put up between "us" and "them." One by one, members of the audience take down the bars that have cut people with disabilities off from their communities.

(Diane Driedger is International Development Officer with the Council of Canadians with Disabilities.)