A cross-cultural perspective

This week in class we started a new subject of disability and medicine. A new concept that stood out from Susan Wendall’s article “The Rejected Body” was that of the “pace of life” factor. She describes this as something similar to that of the male or white advantage that we talked about before, but this stands out from advantage in that non-disabled people are aware of the marginalization and continue the inaccessibility.
In class when we discussed this article, the idea that disability is also a cultural construction got me thinking about how disability is defined in other cultures. I spent last semester studying in Uganda and for several weeks my group and I focused on public health and development. As part of our hands-on learning, we went on field visits. One such visit was to the house where a mentally disabled person lived with his family. We were unaware at the time where we were going and what we were going to do, but were brought into the house and sat around in the living room. The brother of the man that we were apparently supposed to see went to get him and when he saw all of us sitting in his house, he started screaming and fell to the floor. Needless to say, after we left the house we explained to our guide that we did not feel comfortable in that situation and that we would have never gone if we had known.
It turns out that disabled people are kept more or less as a secret in Uganda and even their families keep quiet about them. I spent time in Northern Uganda later in the semester at a rehabilitation center for former child soldiers and the disabled. The staff at the center told us that they would go to villages and try to persuade people to let them know where disabled children might be living so that they could offer them an opportunity for rehab. They also told us horror stories like one child at the center who used to get tied to a rope attached to a tree in the middle of a field while his parents worked during the day. It seems in these situations that not only were the disabled being denied access to the pace of life, but from life in general.
Obviously there are going to be different conceptions of disability across different cultures, but it was difficult to try to look outside my cultural lens or to see anything but human rights abuse. I wonder if, in a society so obsessed with productivity, people ever resent trying to give disabled people aid and access and why there is such a substantial difference in the construction of disabled people in various cultures.