Disability And Isolation

This photo caught my eye this morning. I took it at a fund-raising event for a Church. One of the women is mentally disabled -- yet she is fully part of the event. Our Black and Coloured communities do not isolate people who are disabled, as the White community tends to do -- for instance, by putting people in a home. This was the case when I was in the mission, too. OBSERVATION: When I first visited my wife's world, in the first house we entered, there were steaming pots, and a man shifted edgily on his feet in the candlelight, grinning at me with broken teeth, then glowering. He was mentally disabled, but I didn't know it. In fact he is a nice man -- and, as I say, fully part of the family. It was an unsettling welcome, though.