Living with a disability in a country where everyone is disadvantaged

I grew up with people around me who had some form of a disability or another as my parents were both psychiatric nurses. I suppose this exposure at such a young age always made me treat everyone the same no matter who they were or what their disability was but also heightened a curiosity in me as to how people with disabilities function.  Being in the 3^rd world has been an interesting environment to watch this section of society deal with the day-to-day challenges that the world and the 3^rd world throws at them.

There are so many people here with disabilities but most of them are landmine victims. Seeing limbless people is now just the norm. I’ve spoken to people that are just simple victims, who have lost limbs, and then have spoken to people who planted the landmines and lost hands and fingers as they went off. Each person has a story. Some innocent. Some not so innocent. When I asked a guy who had his fingers blown off and had been left with small ball bearings in his chest and groin from a mine going off in his hands as he planted it, why he had planted the landmine he said “It was kill or be killed. What would you do?” I suppose if you’ve never been faced with this you will fortunately never know.

There is no doubt the kids here are cute and I love the energy they give me but there has to be one over and above all the others who I will always remember.

While I sat having dinner in Kampong Cham, on the banks of the Mekong, this wee boy appeared next to me and just stared at me. This happens a lot in Siem Reap and usually means that the kids are begging or trying to sell you something so I just went about my business. But the difference was this boy asked for nothing and after about 20mins of just staring at me and looking away when I looked at him he made eye contact with me and smiled. Then he pointed to his arms and my arm as if he was asking what was wrong with my arms (apparently there is something wrong with my skin cos I have freckles). I went to answer, as I do with anyone here, and he then signed that he could not speak or hear.

My sign language is basic and is Kiwi sign language, which is different to Khmer sign language, but I’ve been communicating with people who have not spoken the same language as me for months now so what difference would adding sign language to the mix be?

I spent the next 30mins with him telling me in some way or another his name, his age, how many brothers and sisters he had, that his parents were at home, that he went to school and that he could do circus acts. As he left he shook my hand, which was very western so I knew he’d either been doing his homework or been communicating with other westerners, smelled his hand then smiled, gave me the thumbs up and melted as if to go “hmm you smell good.”  

I was so impressed with the level of curiosity this boy had and how his disability didn’t hold him back at all. He was more pushy and craved to speak to someone more than the people here who are living with no disability.  The sad thing was that with no voice this kid was not even able to laugh. I could only tell he found something amusing by the expression on his face.

The education system here is not good enough to cope with the kids with no disabilities let alone a deaf and mute kid. I saw him the next day in a government run school uniform and wondered how they were catering for him, especially after one of my teachers asked me if his student was allowed to write with her left hand and what was wrong with her?

What I can’t understand is why there are so many different sign languages in the world. Apparently 200! People who are deaf are cut off from most people anyway. Wouldn’t it be better for there to be one sign language so that all deaf people could communicate no matter what country they came from? Surely it would make them less disadvantaged in the long run? Who thought this stupid idea up of having so many different sign languages? 

When I went to the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh there was a restaurant across the road from the entrance. I stood at the entrance with my mum and her husband and this wee girl came up to us with this leaflet advertising a restaurant across the road which was run by people with disabilities. As we walked in this guy comes rolling over in his wheelchair (or some contraption that looks like a wheelchair). He’d successfully set up a workshop and a restaurant, which was run by people with all sorts of disabilities.

As I watched him work and listened to his story I couldn’t help but compare him to all the other disabled people in the street here who don’t seem to be able to get out of the rut they are in and aren’t able to make a living for themselves outside of holding their hand out.

Wee girl handing out leaflets for the restaurant - photo taken by my mum.

The one thing that you come up against here more than I could have ever imagined is mental health problems. There are so many people here who suffer from some level of mental health problems and are struggling on a day -to-day basis. It may be simple depression or post traumatic stress disorder. A lot of the mental health problems seem to be a result of the violence and destruction experienced from the years of the Khmer Rouge being in power and the civil war, which only ended in 1998 when Pol Pot died. That means everyone my age has seen extreme violence and destruction. How can you see half of this and not expect there to be some form of mental health problems?

I’ve worked with a lot of characters over the years and am lucky enough to one day be one of those grandmothers who will have great stories but the guy who I’ve been working with here clearly has some mental health problems.  I don’t know what he has seen and experienced but I believe he has manic depression. I suppose like any job managing personalities is the main difficulty not the work itself. Battling through a culture and language I don’t understand let alone dealing with someone who has such extreme highs and lows is exhausting. I never know what I’m walking into and leave work totally zapped some days.

I can’t help but wonder how much awareness there is of mental health problems here. Everyone knows about physical disabilities but this is harder to explain. Especially if the people who are experiencing the mental health problems have no sense of the outside world and do not see, on the same level as an average westerner, how messed up some of the things were that they experienced and how messed up some of the things here are now.

It’s quite difficult here as the religion plays such a huge part of everything, especially, how the disabled are treated. Many Cambodians believe that those born with a disability did something wrong in a past life and are paying for it in this life. Some people understand that they have a disability and assist that person and do right by them and others have no desire to help others as it’s interfering with nature.

The longer I spend here the more I think being disabled does not mean that you need to be disadvantaged.