MYTHS AND CONCEPTS TOWARDS THE HANDICAPPED

In the African concept, specifically, Nigeria being handicapped is viewed with a lot of suspicion and dread. It is assumed sometimes erroneously that becoming a handicapped, must be as a result of having attracted the attentions of a witch, a bad medicine gone awry.

Within certain tribes of the country you protected yourself from having a handicapped child during pregnancy by avoiding any trip at mid-day. The reason is simple if not sometimes hilarious. Bad spirits are assumed to roam the spirit world in the heat of the day or the dead of night, You therefore as a pregnant woman, ensure that if you should encounter such a spirit, it may possess the growing foetus drive out the intended child and take its place. The precaution is to tie a safety pin somewhere on your person or even a small pebble in your wrapper. As civilization became more widespread, that aspect of our myths became muted, but there was an unconscious repulsing for the handicapped. You find that some people hesitated to share hands, touch or at extreme levels stay in the same room with a handicapped person.

On the other hand, the handicapped has been made to feel he’s an oddity and so would be reviving in nature, deprecating or angry, vicious and temperamental.

It is a sad situation, needing an understanding from both sides of the divide. A disability physically is the inability of a part of the body or organ of the body to function at optimal level, thus creating a reduction in the potentials of such an organ to contribute to the optimal function of a human being. We should make up for such by giving support and empathy to anyone who perchance finds himself a disabled person. There is ability in disability, as nature herself compensates all the time through the enhancement of the other organs, a disability in any other part or organ of the body. This is why a visually impaired person might have a sharper auditory sense or nuances in timbre and tone of a voice, or when an auditory deficient person can read your facial moods with stunning accuracy more than you intended or realized.

HANDEF Torch, invites you to share a cause. To give to the handicapped in our society a viable future, particularly the children. To show them that being handicapped does not in anyway remove the possibilities of a viable and exciting future.

Dreams can be met even with a disability.

The real disability is when we fail to see the potentials in our fellow human beings.

The Earth is our common heritage no matter our ability or lack of it