Disabled and homeless on the streets of Freetown (Photo Credit: Mustapha Kamara)
By Mustapha Kamara Jnr.
Santigie Kargbo has multiple disabilities. He cannot walk and he is completely blind. Both feet are dotted with wounds and scars of old ones, which attract flies hovering around his bedraggled body that intermittently shakes them off, much to his discomfort.
Santigie lives on Macdonald Street in the west end of Freetown. The Street is close to Saint John’s Church, one of the most prominent landmark Anglican churches in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leonean. It is situated on the left just before the Old Railway Line Bridge, coming from Saint John intersection.
Every morning, Santigie will apparently crawl out of his makeshift structure, made of sticks, wooden board, tattered plastic and pieces of old rusty corrugated iron sheets to prevent rays directly from the scotching sun, especially in the dries. He lives by begging for alms from passers-by.
“Una sorry for me for God,” he would cry out in the local Krio language, meaning please help me out.These words he would say like a thousand times every day, from dusk to dawn and at the sound of every footsteps coming his direction.
Santigie’s situation, and most disabled persons like him,is very serious when compared to others who are not as challenged as he is.
I was stunned when I first saw him. It was in 2014, at the height of the rainy season. Santigie was sleeping on top of the bare slabs baked from cement with plastic covering his bare body, apparently to shield him from the heavy downpour, typical of the months of August and July in Sierra Leone.
Over a year later, Santigie has secured what he calls home: a structure which has no door, no window and makes no space for bed. He said it was built for him by somebody he didn’t know but who realized that he was suffering.
“It is better now than before because I no longer sleep on the bare floor,” he told me, looking pale and emaciated. He didn’t have any clothes on so I could see his ribs and collar bones, prominently.
When I met Santigie late last month on a foggy Wednesday morning, almost two years after I first saw him at the same spot, he had just woken up and still looked sleepy.
“Who is it?” he asked, sounding and looking a bit scared. And then I introduced myself in a manner that stabilised him a bit, before he could come out of that shudder to greet me.
After the brief introduction, he began explaining that he had not eaten for three days because he had nothing to eat. That sounded shocking to me but appeared real. He was obviously very famished given his looks. His voice sounded like he was battling with serious cold.
“I am suffering here but nobody cares about me. Nobody wants to know how I live here,” he cried as he spoke.
He went further to explain that he had been begging, eating and sleeping on the streets of Freetown since he relocated some four years ago from a small village near Mile 91, in the Yoni Chiefdom, northern Sierra Leone.
“In Sierra Leone the situation of people with disabilities (PWD) is disgusting and I think here is the worse place for them to live,” says Kabba Franklyn Bangura, President of the Sierra Leone Union of People with Disability Issues (SLUDI).
SLUDI has no statistics about their membership but Kabba said there was a huge number of disabled people in the country. The union was set up as a pressure group to advocate for the recognition of the rights and welfare of these people.
“The country’s disabled population is growing, considering the high rate of road accidents which has led to many amputations of victims’ legs and hands,” Kabba said, adding that many children were also being born disabled every day.
“Until now PWD’s are still faced with many social, environmental and institutional challenges that they have been faced with over the decades,” Bangura said.
Disabled advocates say one major challenge, amongst many, is the fact that the country makes no provision for them to move around freely. It’s difficult to access transportation, learning institutions and other facilities like their counterparts in other countries, they claimed.
Sierra Leone has different types of disabled persons but the most common are the physically challenged, those with hearing problems and the visually impaired.
Campaigners have however bemoaned the fact that albinos, epilepsy sufferers, and mentally and intellectually challenged people are not considered disable by the laws of the country. This, they say have left these categories of people neglected.
A recent HANDICAP International report, titled: ‘Cultural Perception and Attitude Towards Disability,’ notes that there is a lot of myth surrounding the result of disability in Sierra Leone, none of which, it adds, has any factual basis.
“Traditionally many people in the country are with the superstitious belief that disability is as a result of a witch craft or a spell, magic and sorcery,” the report reads.
Stigmatization
According to the report, some of these myths blame mothers for the impairment of their children and also encourage stigmatization and exclusion of persons with disabilities, while many others propagate the belief that disability is the ‘will of God’.
Amanda Crooks, Country Representative of Handicap International, who is also its Social Inclusion and Rights coordinator, in a recent interview, told Politico that: “People with disabilities are faced with huge challenges all around the world but in Sierra Leone they are faced with more challenges than those living in other countries.” She said that in addition to these, is the fact that accessing health care, education, transportation and securing a job is a serious challenge.
Sahr Korteque, lecturer at the Peace and Conflict Department at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, added that disabled people were also faced with attitudinal, environmental and institutional barriers. He said the people referred to as disabled are not necessarily disabled, and that they are only being limited to do things.
“If there were no barriers they could to do things like others,” he said.
“…the most difficult one which I think government should try to address is the institutional barrier,” he added.
Korteque said this is responsible for the high rate of illiteracy among disabled in the country.
“We were expecting that our conditions would have changed, now that we have a disable as deputy minister of Social Welfare, and the establishment of the Disabled Commission. But it’s the same old story,” cried Seray Bangura, head of African Youth with Disability Network Sierra Leone.
“Disabled people can do better if they are given the opportunity and support they need.”
(C) Politico 04/02/16
