By Chika Abanobi
When you run into a young man called Alexander Ogheneruemu, known as “Bro. Alex”, you run into potential Alexander the Great. When you sit down and chat with him, you feel uneasy about sitting before a potential Beethoven, Stephen Hawking, or Fanny Crosby.
The three aforementioned personalities, if you will recall, proved by their life achievements, that disability does not make you a liability to your society. Given the right motivation, you can achieve even more than people without disability.
While Ludwig van Beethoven, a deaf German composer and pianist did so with his classical music compositions, Fanny Crosby, a blind woman who composed most of the Christian hymns we sing today, achieved a similar feat with her songs like “To God Be the Glory” and “Draw Me Nearer.”
Stephen Hawking’s case is even worse. The man who suffered from a rare muscular disease that paralysed all his body’s muscles except the one moving his eyelids, had, by having machine nodes attached to his forehead, to read the workings of his scientific mind, won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Like the three, Alex, a 2019 graduate of the Federal College of Education (Special), Oyo, (he read Cultural and Creative Arts/Special Education in Learning Disabilities), belongs to a group many know today as “People With Disabilities” (PWD). Like Beethoven, suffers from partial deafness.
Born again with a dream
A dedicated born-again Christian in his 30s, if you listen to this holder of a Nigerian Certificate in Education (NCE) talk, you will think you are listening to a professor with a string of degrees in a given field of academic discipline. He attributes his highly philosophical mind, Intelligent Quotient, and fluent flow of the English language to years of rigorous reading and study of all sorts of books.
The man who came to visit you in your house, the other day, a Thursday, says he wants to be a creative writer. Right now, he is a freelance writer and an ad hoc worker in food processing, he tells you. His decision to visit came after some WhatsApp communications between the two of you, and in which he expressed such desire. That was after he read a couple of your articles in Church Times and other online publications.
“I’d like to tell the stories of people with disabilities, but creatively,” he said. “I want to use what God has given me in terms of personal gifting, including the experiences He has allowed me to pass through, to benefit people with disabilities. I know where the shoe pinches. The communication gap is the main problem of deaf people. I want to use my experience, ab initio, to bring some solution there, to influence things, through my writing or whatever gift God has given to me.”
Being partially deaf, he hears what you are saying in snatches. He does so either by reading your lips and being able to catch one or two key words. With them, he can arrive at what he thinks you mean. But to be able to do so, he strains his ear to hear while watching the movements of your lips. In his responses to your speech, he also puts in commensurate efforts to get his points across. And, he speaks with a bit of tutter. With such strictures in his voice, he punches the air as he speaks.
Kudos, advice for the Church
In Nigeria, Alex is also the Facilitator for a group that calls itself “The Inclusive Church.” A group that comprises People With Disabilities (you can call them PWD 1) and People Without Disabilities (call them PWD 2), their aim is one: to make the church world, especially in Nigeria, pay a little more attention to issues that have to do with PWD 1 in their midst.
“I don’t want you to misunderstand me,” he says as he tries to disabuse your mind of whatever wrong impression that might have been planted in it, by the purports of the group “The Inclusive Church.” “The Church has been trying by providing interpreters who were given professional training in sign language”, he confesses. “Nobody can take that one away from the Church.
But what we are saying is, involve these people with disabilities in active church activities other than having them sit together in a place to listen to messages. Let them have a sense of belonging. There is a difference between participation and inclusion. Somebody can be included in the church as a member. But they might not be participating in whatever is going on there. I give an example of myself. I believe that I have something to offer. But I need to feel that sense of being carried along; it is not there.”
Miracle and disability
The conversation drifts back to Beethoven, Hawking, and Crosby. If these three were among the PWD 1 of today, he insists, all that church folks in PWD 2 would have done for them would be to train professionals in sign language to communicate the gospel message to them while they continue to pray to receive their divine miracles of healing from the Lord.
“It is not only the miracles of the deaf hearing, the blind seeing, or the lame walking that God can work with,” Alex explains. “He can work in different ways His wonders to perform. His will is to heal, quite alright. But if He chooses not to do so for reason He might not disclose to any of us because He is not obliged to do that, there are other miracles He can perform in someone’s life. He knows better and has a better result from a given situation.”
Motivations and listening to people with disabilities
At this juncture, he sighs, as he remembers the frustrations he is faced with, from time to time, as a result of his condition. Then he adds: “There is no way you can get to the basis of the situation as to proffer a solution without involving the people who wear the shoes.
From experience, the Church has been using people without valid experiences. They should listen to people who are in the thick of the disability experience. They should hear their stories. When I say this I am not limiting it to only deaf people. People are feeling hurt. They feel aggrieved inside the house of God. I know what people are going through; it’s only that some may not say it.”
This is why he wants to be a great writer: he thinks he will tell their stories better and even profit society more. This is why he would be happy if he could be sponsored by the Church to read creative writing or journalism in a good school. But he doesn’t want to be sent to a school in Nigeria where he might end up being the sole deaf student in a hearing setting and where nobody might pay adequate attention to him because he is the only one. Instead, he wants to be sent to a special writing school abroad where there are ready-made facilities for people like him to soar to the sky.
At this point, you realise that it is not Beethoven, Hawking, or Crosby that Alex wants to be like at the end of the day but famous deaf writers like Asphyxia, Cece Bell, Cheyenna Clearbrook, Michael Chorost, Matt Daigle, Haben Girma, Dr. Ernest Hairson, Chella Man, Sarah Novic, Josh Swiller, Jessica White or Mary Herring Wright.
You put that argument across to him. But he laughs and dismisses your observation with a wave of hand. Whether he ends up being Beethoven, Hawking, Crosby, or the aforementioned deaf writers, does not matter, he counters. What matters is the motivation that people bring to support your dream “Motivation is key,” he says. “The Church should set the example for others to follow.”