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A Dream Fulfilled
by Carolyn Anne Anderson
Excerpts:
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A few years ago, I traveled with a group of students and professors to North Africa. The trip was a personal victory for me because I traveled in my wheelchair. I had assumed my international traveling days were over when I was paralyzed from the waist down in an automobile accident in 1991. . .
. . . When our plane finally landed in Casablanca, we drove directly to Rabat, where we spent the next few days. We then proceeded to Marrakech, and I began to acclimate to the most prominent feature of Morocco’s urban landscapes: people everywhere. The streets and markets were full of commotion at all hours. As we wandered through the old Medina of Marrakech, I remembered a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Man Who Knew Too Much, when a frantic Jimmy Stewart runs among the snake charmers and vendors to find his son.As I maneuvered my wheelchair through the hoards of people, my close proximity to the ground put me in touch with many different smells -- the saffron drying in the wind, the racks of freshly slaughtered sheep. Most memorable was the scent of baking bread, which emanated from every corner. Thick, round, flat bread is consumed with every meal in Morocco, along with fresh squeezed orange juice . . . . . . . . . I felt a pang of guilt when I noted the subtle jealous glance that a legless man gave me as he thoroughly inspected every inch of my lightweight, titanium sports wheelchair. He had never seen anything like it. My guilt did not stem from pity, for the man was in no way pitiful. Sitting in his wheelchair, a four-wheeled contraption made of assorted old bicycle parts, he explained that he was a shop owner, a businessman. He was doing rather well, despite the fact that he’d had access to less medical equipment in his lifetime than I go through in a year. His attitude was one of gratitude and excitement to meet a disabled person from another culture. And it was precisely this cheerful attitude that gave rise to my feelings of guilt. A phrase heard over and over in Morocco is en sh’Allah, which means literally “if it is God’s will.” En sh’Allah someday I will have a wheelchair like that! En sh’Allah we will meet again. I thought about how annoyed I get when an able-bodied person pulls in front of me to take the last accessible parking space, and then gets out of the car and runs into a store. Or how often I whine about my ongoing fights with the managed care companies about medical coverage and benefits. I had wished so often to trade places with someone who could walk, to get up out of my wheelchair and live my life as I had before the accident. Looking into this man’s eyes, I knew he would really like to trade positions with me, just to have a wheelchair like mine. I suddenly realized I have everything I need and more . . .
