travelling with a disability

Zoe is 39, divorced with three teenagers living at home and thanks to a generous insurance payout for chronic work-related back injuries she no longer has to face the grind of work - or the humiliation of welfare and poverty - and is now enjoying the luxury of being a financially independent woman, but a disabled one nevertheless. Despite constant pain, Zoe decided to do some travelling and although it was difficult, she derived additional strength from the experience.

"The nicest thing about having teenaged children," says Zoe, "is being able to get out and about without the kids in tow. Being the first born I more or less raised my kid brother - and then I raised my own three kids - and now that my payout is through it's my time! And I mean my time. I'm not interested in dating or relationships. I'm going to devote the rest of my life to being selfishly single and getting as much out of life as my disability allows me to!"

"Previously, I had never got further than the local beach with my kids because of the pain," explains Zoe, "but I had always yearned to travel and experience life in the 'raw'. You know, do something a bit dangerous in keeping with being a Scorpio woman."

What Zoe did, in fact, was reinvent herself. Not physically, but mentally.

"All those years I'd spent working and raising the kids had dulled my brain as well as injuring my back," confides Zoe. "I wanted to reinvent myself as a global woman, a true cosmopolitan, with the amazing ability to blend in everywhere I went - and when I took a train trip through Italy and stopped at Pisa my new reinvented persona was confirmed."

"An Italian asked me for directions - in Italian, of course," laughs Zoe, "and that's why Pisa will always have a special place in my heart."

"I chose to travel by train, alone, rather than go on a packaged bus tour for various reasons," explains Zoe. "For one thing, train travel wouldn't be as hard on my back as a bus, and when you travel alone you get in touch with your feelings - and that's what I wanted to do."

"Also, Italy is so easy to visit by train and the service is fantastic," says Zoe. "You just have to make sure that you don't get on a rapid train if you want to get off at every city!"

"I bought a rail pass - for the convenience rather than the savings," says Zoe. "Had I been traveling on a budget, though, I think I'd pay as I go as it's too easy to lose the rail pass."

A typical tourist Zoe is not - which is probably why she blends in so easily wherever she goes. She carries neither camera slung around her neck nor garish airline bags proclaiming where she came from. She dresses in the international gear of blue jeans and white shirt, and wears joggers and carries a light shoulder bag. With her back injury, she cannot carry too much so traveling light is very important for her.

Zoe claims that having brown hair and brown eyes is a great asset in being accepted as a global woman - even in Scandinavian countries. A blue-eyed blonde, on the other hand, would stand out like a sore thumb south of Switzerland and would never be mistaken for an Italian in Italy, and if she were stopped in the street it would not be directions that were asked of her but her telephone number!

Actually, when the businessman stopped Zoe as she was walking from the tower back to the railway station, she hesitated to pay attention to him as she was a pretty lady and this was, after all, Italy - a land renowned as much for its Casanovas and gigolos as its cassava and pizza.

When she heard him ask, in Italian, for directions to a street that not even a native Pisan would probably be able to assist him with, Zoe was really amused but pleased that she had been mistaken for a local.

"In my halting Italian, I answered that I didn't have a clue where the street he wanted was," says Zoe, "but I did know where the railway station was if that could assist him - and he looked slightly surprised, thanked me, smiled and walked off."

"Usually, I don't buy souvenirs," explains Zoe. "It's not just because I travel light and can't carry too much because of my back. It's because I prefer to carry memories in my heart. For some reason, though, I couldn't resist buying a little Tower of Pisa while I was there."

"As I waited at the railway station for the train that would take me to the next city, I unwrapped the little statue of the Tower of Pisa that would be my only tangible memory of my visit to the city, and remembered that man," smiled Zoe. "Not because he was a man, and an attractive one at that, but because he saw me as I wanted people to see me - as a normal person."

"Yes, the tower was amazing - slightly bent, like me - but still standing and strong," says Zoe. "but it wasn't the tower that stuck so much in my memory of Pisa as being asked directions in that city by a native Italian."

When Zoe returned home, happy and renewed, full of wonderful memories to share, her children jokingly suggested that her next trip should be to Afghanistan.

"Bet you wouldn't get asked directions there, they laughed at me," says Zoe, "but it's a challenge I'm seriously considering. Why not? How many single moms do you know who have the money and opportunity to do such things? Even with my disability I like to think that I'm making the most of my life for all single moms, not just for myself."

obesity means social death

Coco's obesity has been classified as a disability and as such she is entitled to welfare payments but she steadfastly refuses to rot at home and continues to actively seek work even though the reception she receives from most job interviewers is a humiliating experience.

"I never even knew that people can die from obesity until I read an article about it," says Coco. "Sure, I know about my risk for heart disease but to be faced with a separate classification for death by obesity is very challenging and smacks, to me, of medical discrimination on top of all the other discrimination I face every day from everyone else."

"The article highlights alienation as the top cause of obesity death and that makes sense to me," says Coco. "If thin people faced as much cruel and humiliating discrimination as obese people do at job interviews -- and every other kind of human encounter -- I wonder if the medical establishment would come up with a new type of thin death classification (not anorexia) to account for the resultant spate of deaths?"

"That the article also highlighted a high Social Security expenditure (% of GDP) as a factor in obesity death also makes sense to me," says Coco. "Nations that are quick to classify obese people as disabled and pay them to rot at home are definitely contributing to obesity deaths."

"When you're pushed out of sight and mind, unloved and unwanted, with nothing better to do than stuff yourself with comfort food while watching soaps you're already suffering a social death, right?"

"Here's the article I read alienation causes obesity death?"

menopausal and washed up

Davina is single, 50, on disability payments and has been going through a really bad menopause for several years. She considers herself 'washed up' and gets very angry when people quote improved unemployment figures and suggest it's about time she gets a job.

"The unemployment figures are doctored," say Davina. "They don't give the real picture and they hide many washed up men and women of all ages - not just the over 50s - with or without health problems."

"When you include mature-aged students, working aged people on various welfare allowances and pensions, the underemployed and those who are out of the system being supported by their families," adds Davina, "the true unemployment figure is closer to 30% of the workforce and is nowhere near the 5% or under that the government figures say."

"I'm not a deadbeat," says Davina. "I'm just washed up - considered unemployable by employers. Drop in to your local welfare office and you'll see for yourself who the washed up are. Most are well-dressed and well-educated men and women just like you and I, but they're older people generally, of course, and most are suffering some crisis or other at home or having health problems."

"It angers me why the government is deliberately hiding the true facts about unemployment and causing so many decent people to become unfairly marginalized and victimized."

"There are not enough jobs available for everyone of working age and many of those who are working are underemployed in part-time jobs or working on short-term contracts that land them back on welfare."

"Also, the vast majority of advertised positions are churned jobs," says Davina. "They go to people already in jobs."

"Without influential and supportive friends and families, many people who find themselves suddenly unemployed really have no hope of secure re-employment - especially if they are over 50," says Davina, "and the picture is worse for anyone with a disability."

"I'm really upset when people sneer at me and say that my health problem shouldn't stop me from working," says Davina. "Sure, there are jobs out there that don't require standing or running around - but they don't go to people like me. They go to people without mobility problems."

"I'm not on disability for nothing," snaps Davina. "I spent nearly two years looking for suitable work before giving up. What with terrible menopausal symptoms on top of a mobility problem I just couldn't cope any more. Thousands of women go mental at menopause, and there's good reason they do. It's a terrible time for a woman."

"If people can't offer the washed up a job, starting Monday at 8am," says Davina, "then it's useless and cruel to tell them to go out and find a job."

"Does it ever occur to these smart asses that people become washed up as a result of having already spent a year or more tramping the streets looking for a job?"

"When I was working I never begrudged my tax dollars going towards supporting people on welfare," says Davina, "and if people get shitty because I've got cable and they don't - and I'm home all day and they're not - then they should think again."

"I'd rather have a job and the government welfare officers can change places with me any day - but when I ask them whether they're prepared to give up their job and give it to me they won't do it. Why? If it's so easy to get a job then they wouldn't have any trouble finding another one, would they? They won't give up their job to the washed up because they are scared like hell of being washed up themselves."

"What I spend my welfare check on is my business - and the few luxuries I have merely make my miserable existence more bearable."

"If the government can't provide full employment for everybody then I believe it has a duty of care towards the washed up," says Davina. "I would even go so far as to say that it should provide gratis some sort of soma for them in the form of a drug or entertainment."

"Because none of us know when our number is up work wise," says Davina, "it makes more sense to give our tax dollar to the washed up than have it end up in some political slush fund or be given to some corporate welfare grabber or be spent in some alien country."

"When the government not only deliberately fudges the true state of unemployment but also encourages the general population to vilify anyone not in gainful employment," says Davina, "it is trying to take the heat off the true state of the economy and where the tax dollars are really going."

"If all the mature-aged students, working aged people on various non-unemployment welfare allowances and pensions and those who are out of the system being supported by their families were included in the next unemployment figure," says Davina, "the nation would have a wake-up call worse than an earthquake!"

"The government doesn't want that happening, so the bureaucrats fudge the figures and pretend there are plenty of jobs out there and by implication that means that anyone not working is a lazy layabout or a deadbeat."

"If we didn't have welfare," says Davina, "half our nation would be begging on the streets."

"Maybe that's what we need to happen in order for the rest of the nation - those in jobs - to understand that the unemployment figure is a hell of a lot more than what the government tells us."

"Leave me alone will ya," shouts Davina, "I'm menopausal and mad as hell!"


(Davina's story first appeared as fudged unemployment figures and is reprinted with permission.)