Dozens of students and community members attended the Disability Awareness Conference on Saturday evening in the Many Nations Longhouse. The event was highlighted by several stories, poems, and experiences from activists Lezlie Frye and Noemi Sohn. The open meeting was the finale to a two-day program that included sessions on how to ally with and support students with disabilities.
Shortly after 5 p.m., the event began with Frye’s poetry and stories sharing what it’s like to have a physical disability in her left hand. She gave detailed personal accounts of instances in her life where people without disabilities had ridiculed or reacted very negatively to her physical defect. Her first poem was about the difficulties she has in her daily life that most people take for granted. Simple things like “five-fingered gloves” were mentioned to represent how even basic products don’t even consider people with disabilities.
Frye read two stories. The first was about prosthetics and their role in assimilating people with disabilities.
Just before the story, she explained her thoughts while writing it: “While prosthetic limbs are important functional tools for lots of folks, for me it wasn’t about function. It was about making me look like an able-bodied person.”
She followed this story and concluded her performance with a story about her encounter with a boy at a Eugene grocery store who repeatedly called her a freak. She narrated the verbal exchange between her and the boy in what seemed to be an indication of what Frye has had to endure in her life on many occasions.
The crowd routinely reacted with a heavy round of applause following each of Frye’s pieces.
She reflected on the event after she finished a poem, saying, “It’s really important for me to connect with other people with disabilities.”
After a short intermission, Sohn spoke about the general problems associated with labeling and discriminating against people with disabilities. She feels that disability should be “taken out of the medical model” and that disabilities are currently “an individual issue.” It needs to become a broader and more general issue in society, she said.
“We need to look at disabilities as an aspect of someone’s life and not a designation of who they are,” Sohn said.
Sohn then began reading various poems including “Passing,” which expressed her minority status as a Filipina woman with cerebral palsy. She made it clear that both her ethnicity and her gender were very important parts of her identity in addition to her disability. Sohn has a vast experience in poetry, which she writes mainly in her hometown of San Francisco.
Events like the Disability Awareness Conference are only half the battle, Sohn said. While the conference fulfilled its job of increasing knowledge and consciousness of disabilities, Sohn stressed that people must follow up these promises with real results. The main question is “where to go after the conferences,” she said.
University student Alison Cerezo was the primary person responsible for putting on the event. It is the first conference at the University that has dealt with students and disabilities. The sessions that preceded Saturday evening were designed to inform the community on how to strengthen support systems for disabilities. Cerezo reacted optimistically to the event, saying, “It was great to talk and hold a space where students can build connections and I’m really excited about the student turnout.”
University senior Jonathan Irwin was impressed by the event.
He said, “I’m a poet and I have heard other poetry from very powerful people. I really liked the poetry here and what they had to say.”