If you were sorry to see the 2012 Summer Olympics come to an end on Sunday, I have good news: they’re not over yet! The Summer Paralympic Games start in London on August 29, and journalism student Sandra Murillo is here with a guest post about a friend who will be competing for gold this year.

Anjali makes the team

By Sandra Murillo

Before I became a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I knew very little about the Paralympics. I knew that the athletes who competed in these Olympics had physical disabilities, but I had no idea what kind of training the athletes went through. I thought that any athlete with a disability could just sign up and be in the Paralympics if they wanted to.

That’s Anjali Forber-Pratt and her chariot of fire.

But then I became friends with Paralympic Medalist Anjali Forber-Pratt, and I discovered nothing could be further from the truth.

I met Anjali at U of I when we were both asked to be on a panel and share our experiences as individuals with disabilities with a class of students majoring in special education. Anjali was working on getting her Ph.D. in Human Resource Education, and from the minute I met her I sensed her determination and energetic personality.

Anjali was born in Calcutta India and was adopted when she was two months old. Two months after her adoptive parents brought her home to Natick, Massachusetts, Anjali developed Transverse Myelitis, a neurological condition that affects the spinal cord and left her paralyzed from the waist down.

Anjali tells me that as a child she thought she would eventually outgrow her disability. She admits that when she realized that would not happen she felt sad, but not for long. Anjali’s introduction to sports came during the Boston Marathon when she was only five years old. She remembers seeing the wheelchair racers competing, and that changed her life forever.

As a child Anjali practiced different sports, including wheelchair track, road racing and downhill skiing. She credits her parents and older brother for her extensive involvement in sports. As a child she and her brother would play outside together, and her brother always found ways to involve her in different activities. Anjali jokes that since she grew up with only a brother she had no choice but to learn how to play rough games and sports. She is very thankful for the support and high expectations her family has always had for her.

Today Anjali is one of the top three fastest women in the world in the 100 meter, 200 meter and 400 meter races. She has competed in the 2011 Boston Marathon and in several other national and international marathons. Anjali competed in the 2008 Paralympic games in Beijing as part of team USA, and will be competing in the 2012 Paralympic games in London. She received her Ph.D. last May and recently co-authored a children’s coloring book about athletes with disabilities.

Anjali hopes to inspire disabled and non-disabled individuals to pursue all of their dreams and goals. By having the pleasure of becoming Anjali’s friend I know she will continue her successes, both as an athlete and as a person. I’m also confident – and expect – that she’ll bring home at least one gold medal!

This just in: The United States Olympic Committee just announced today that they’ll create original video content for the U.S. Paralympics YouTube channel, and that NBC Sports Network (NBCSN) will air one-hour highlight shows on Sept. 4, 5, 6 and 11 at 7 p.m. EDT. you can watch the Paralympics from home this year!

The orientation packet they sent out for the Summer Military Sport Camp I’m volunteering at includes a primer on disability etiquette. Among other things, the two-page document suggests that if the situation is appropriate, we should “strike up a conversation and include the person in whatever is going on, just as you would do for an average-looking person.” I’ve read documents like this before (I work part-time at Easter Seals Headquarters, and they feature a similar list of guidelines on their web site). I am sure the people who devise these guidelines mean well, but do they realize that their well-intentioned lists might leave a person with a disability feeling, well, like they’re talking to a person who is nervous about talking to them?

The antidote? A list of do’s and don’ts that turns the notion of disability etiquette on its head. I appreciated this parody so much when I first read it that I thought the time was right to resurrect it.

What To Do when You Meet a Sighted Person
People who use their eyes to acquire information about the world are called sighted people or “people who are sighted.” Legal “sight” means any visual acuity greater than 20/200 in the better eye without correction or an angle of vision wider than 20 degrees. Sighted people enjoy rich, full, lives, as they work, play, and raise families. They run businesses, hold public offices, and teach your children.

Sighted people cannot function well in low lighting conditions and are usually helpless in total darkness. Their homes are usually brightly lit at great expense, as are businesses that cater to the sighted consumer.

How Can I Best Communicate with Sighted People?
Sighted people are accustomed to viewing the world in visual terms. This means that in many situations, they will not be able to communicate orally and may resort to pointing or other gesturing. They may also use subtle facial expressions to convey feelings in social situations. Calmly alert the sighted person to his or her surroundings by speaking slowly, in a normal tone of voice. There is no need to raise your voice when addressing a sighted person.

How Do Sighted People Get Around?
People who are sighted may walk or ride public transportation, but most choose to travel long distances by operating their own motor vehicles, usually one passenger to a car. They have gone through many hours of extensive training to learn the rules of the road in order to further their independence. Once that road to freedom has been mastered, sighted people earn a legal classification and a driver’s license, which allows them to operate a private vehicle relatively safely and independently.

How Can I Assist a Sighted Person?
At times, sighted people may need help finding things, especially when operating a motor vehicle. Your advance knowledge of routes and landmarks, particularly bumps in the road, turns, and traffic lights, will assist the “driver” in finding the way quickly and easily. Your knowledge of building layouts can also assist the sighted person in navigating complex shopping malls and offices. Sighted people tend to be very proud and will not ask directly for assistance. Be gentle, yet firm.

How Do Sighted People Read?Sighted people read via a system called “print.” Print is a series of images drawn in a two-dimensional plane. Because the person who is sighted relies exclusively on visual information, his or her attention span tends to fade quickly when reading long texts. People who are sighted generally have a poorly developed sense of touch. Braille is completely foreign to the sighted person and he or she will take longer to learn the code and be severely limited by his or her existing visual senses.

How Do Sighted People Use Computers?
Computer information is presented to sighted people in a “Graphical User Interface” or GUI. Sighted people often suffer from hand-eye coordination problems. To accommodate this difficulty, people who are sighted use a “mouse,” a handy device that slides along the desk top to save confusing keystrokes. With one button, the sighted person can move around his or her computer screen quickly and easily.
People who are sighted are not accustomed to synthetic speech and may have great difficulty understanding even the clearest synthesizer. Be patient and be prepared to explain many times how your computer equipment works.

How Can I Support a Sighted Person?
People who are sighted do not want your charity. They want to live, work and play alongside you on an equal basis. The best thing you can do to support sighted people in your community is to open yourself to their world. These citizens are vital contributing members of the community, real people with thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, and a story to tell. Take a sighted person to lunch today!

The seniors in my memoir classes have clever ways of letting me know when they disapprove of a writing topic. Wanda groaned when I assigned “in-laws,” and she returned the next week with a colorful essay about a second cousin once removed who’d spent much of his adult life in and out of prison. I could hear her mischievous grin as she finished reading her essay, plopped her paper on the table and declared, “he was an outlaw!” Janie wasn’t crazy about the topic, either. She came back with a piece she wrote about her decision to forego law school after college. She did not end up, ahem, in law.

Myrna’s mother-in-law Hedwig is on the left. That’s Henry, Hedwig’s son and Myrna’s husband, on the right. And that’s baby Elizabeth being held by Hedwig. Taken in 1962.

Myrna Knepler was one of the very, very, few students who opted to use the assignment to write about her mother-in law.

Myrna’s Husband Henry was only 16 when he said goodbye to his mother and father in Vienna and boarded the Kindertransport (children’s transport), the effort that saved 10,000 Jewish children from the Holocaust. Henry’s father died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His mother — Hedwig — survived by hiding In an unheated cabin in the Vienna woods, owned by an anti-Nazi family who sheltered her there. Hedwig would not reunite with Henry, her only child, until he was 24 years old.

Myrna would get to know Hedwig Knepler a decade later, after marrying Henry. From Myrna’s essay:

Although she had proved both mental and physical sturdiness, she was thin and bent in a way that made her seem fragile and untouchable. Certainly her life experience was beyond anything I knew, in some ways so terrible I was afraid to touch it.

Moreover, I sensed the tension between her and my husband, her son. I, his new, much younger wife, wanted above all to please him. He loved his mother, but was troubled by what seemed to be her almost obsessive concern for him, a concern more appropriate to the mother of a young boy, than to a balding assistant professor in his late thirties.

Myrna wrote that her conversations with her mother-in-law were awkward until Myrna and Henry had their first daughter, Elizabeth.

Then for the six months between Liz’s birth and Hedwig’s death, talk was easier, focused on our mutual love for and wonder at this new creature, the grandchild she never expected to have.

Hedwig died in 1962, leaving Myrna and Henry to sort through a box of letters Hedwig and Henry had exchanged before and after the war. The letters were written in German (a language Myrna does not know well) and stored in their attic for years. The only time Myrna and her husband Henry opened the cardboard box together, they closed it up right away and put it back on the shelf. The material inside was too painful for Henry to read.

Henry died in 1999, and before his death, when he was too ill to deal with the letters himself, Myrna realized that they were now her responsibility. She unpacked nearly one thousand pages of letters — all typed single-spaced and to the edge of the page — and started sorting them by date to donate to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In exchange, the museum would translate and make copies for Myrna and her daughters.

The translated letters trickled back to Myrna over a span of six years, and after reading them all Myrna was able to piece together stories of how her mother-in-law helped a brother immigrate safely to Argentina. She read heartbreaking details of her mother-in-law’s attempts to help her mother and aunt, who were already interned. They did not survive. Myrna’s mother-in-law wrote about her own struggles to support herself. About how she starved. How she helped save others. About how, in the end, some of the people she saved ended up helping her.

The original letters Myrna’s mother-in-law exchanged with Myrna’s husband are now preserved in a vault outside of Washington, D.C., where scholars can access them. Myrna ended her essay about the letters with a question. “Could I ever be as brave, as self reliant, as helpful to others as she was?” I would say yes, Myrna, you could. I just hope you are never, ever put to the test the way your mother-in-law was.

A screen reader called JAWS lets me use a computer to read and write, and when power user Sue Martin generously donated a series of her JAWS refresher classes to this year’s auction benefitting the Seeing Eye, , I bid on it – and won!

Sue lost her sight when she was 26, and she works for The United States Department of Veterans Affairs as a management analyst. She squeezes me into her busy life for an hour-long JAWS class every Friday over the phone, and in-between teaching me to use Notification Bars and navigation quick keys, she lets me in on her progress writing a memoir. Sue is a courageous woman, and that’s not just because she’s willing to try to teach a technology nincompoop like me to improve my computer skills. Her guest post explains her decision to share her life story.

Out of the whirlpool

by Sue Martin

Certified JAWS instructor Sue Martin and her Seeing Eye dog Kismet.

I’ve known that I would write my story for years, it was just a question of when. When I was twenty six I was deeply depressed. When I thought I was out of options I tried to kill myself with a gun. I didn’t manage to kill myself. Instead my suicide attempt resulted in my blindness. I was no less depressed but now I had blindness to deal with on top of the depression. Putting my life back together after that fateful act has been a long and sometimes difficult road, but today, I’m quite content.

I didn’t used to tell people that my blindness was the result of a suicide attempt, but every time I’d hear a story of someone committing suicide I knew the time for me to come out and tell my own story was drawing closer. When I heard that some people I knew had a friend take her own life in England last January, I knew the time had come.

I started a blog, and before I knew it the blog turned into a book. I’m close to finishing the writing, and an editor is helping me sort through plans to consider as I move to publication.

Why am I writing this book? I want to shine a light on suicidal depression. It can happen to anyone anywhere at any time. The key to overcoming depression is to recognize it, talk about it, and ask for help. As long as there is life there is hope, and my hope is that, by sharing my story, I can maybe, just maybe, save a life.

The working title of Sue’s story is “Out of the Whirlpool,” and you can hear her talk about her writing project (and enjoy her sweet Alabama drawl!) on an interview on Freedom Scientific’s July 2012 podcast.

A photo from last year’s RIC Summer Camp.

My job at Easter Seals Headquarters just started a program called Outside In that gives employees up to one week of on-the-clock (paid!) time to volunteer for another non-profit organization. The idea is to learn what’s going on “outside” of Easter Seals and bring ideas from the experience back “in.”

One of my co-workers used the Outside In hours to work with a non-profit organization called The Five Project to help train people with autism in Shaanxi, China. Another volunteered in El Salvador with an organization called ENLACE to build a road that will help farmers transport crops and allow kids to walk to school safely.

Whitney and I are sticking closer to home. Next weekend the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) and the Wounded Heroes Foundation are sponsoring a sports camp in Chicago specially designed for injured military personnel with physical disabilities. From the RIC Life Center web site:

Elite level coaches will teach wounded veterans a variety of sports, including sitting volleyball, archery, sled hockey, power lifting, wheelchair basketball, judo, kayaking, tennis, rowing, cycling, field, and swimming.

The camp sounded interesting to me for a variety of reasons, so I wrote Alex Spencer, the Wirtz Sports Intern at RIC, to let him know that I was interested in volunteering. I explained that I am blind and use a Seeing Eye dog, and warned that he might not want to enlist me to help at the archery range. Alex wrote back with all sorts of ideas, finally settling on having us help with Food/Hydration/General Assistance. I’m looking forward to camp, especially after reading this little tidbit on the volunteer orientation information they sent out last week:

-HAVE FUN! Sure, we all have a job to do, but who says we can’t have fun while doing it?! This camp is a great opportunity to show how much we appreciate those who serve our country. Feel free to mingle with the athletes and get to know them a bit.

And gee, as much as I hate to miss our weekly hourlong meeting at work, I think somehow we’ll manage to have fun at camp. Let’s just hope I can stop Whitney from fetching the tennis balls and jumping into Lake Michigan to chase the kayaks while we’re there.