Hell for the Handicapped

If the compassion of a nation can be judged by the treatment of its less fortunate citizens, this country is close to paradise when compared to many other parts of the world. Having recently become handicapped, I have experienced a multitude of frustrations in learning how to navigate and survive in an environment that is often not handicapped friendly. However, nothing could have prepared me for what I would encounter on a recent trip to the Middle East and Black Sea. I greatly enjoyed all the sights, but the only way you could get me go again is at gunpoint.

Other than a few other passengers from the cruise ship, I didn't see another person in a wheelchair during the entire trip. I think if you're handicapped in the Third World, they must either shoot you or lock you in a basement somewhere. There is simply no good way of getting around. A handicapped ramp is a great rarity. There are few public toilets (none of which are designed for handicapped use), and not even a place on any curb providing wheelchair accessibility. After being pushed continually over cobblestone streets, sand, broken pavement, and jerked over curbs and steps. I also began to feel like I had shaken-baby syndrome. But my distress was minor compared to that of my daughter who had to do most of the heavy lifting.

When we went for lunch at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul there were several long narrow flights of stairs that had to be negotiated to get to the restaurant. Upon seeing me, the hostess immediately assembled about six waiters to haul me up and down wheelchair and all. I was terrified that one of them would trip and I would go bouncing down the steps on my head, but somehow Allah was with us that day. However, later among great hoards of people at the spice market, I had to ask our tour guide if there was some alternative to wetting my pants, and he found a shopkeeper willing to let me go down a very narrow flight of stairs with no banister leading to a sort of hole in the wall in the basement that served as a urinal. My daughter helped me down while i clung to the higher steps as she worked my legs from below, and I spent the whole time terrified that I was going to fall on her, but Allah was once more merciful.

From such experiences I have a theory as to why Muslim women dress from head to toe in black and keep their faces covered. It allows them to perform bodily functions by ducking into alley-ways with complete anonymity, and although I saw no Burqas on the trip, I now suspect they come fully equipped as a porta-potty.

I have also reached the conclusion that the human race may be inherently irrational. The "Holy Land" mostly looks like a piece of real estate rejected by Nevada and Southern Wyoming, yet people have been killing each other over this arid pile of rocks and sand since antiquity. However, there did seem to be something of an explanation in this: When a child offered me an olive branch at the Mount of Olives, I accepted it gratefully, but when he became aware that I really carried no money, he immediately snatched it back.

My perceptions have been altered in other ways as well. Henceforth, when I hear, "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem," I will think of Tijuana Mexico, as the place has the same ambiance, including the border crossing and hucksters continually pushing souvenirs in your face. I couldn't get into the Church of the Nativity (as promised by the tour company), but my daughter tells me it has been preserved as a dark basement in which there is little to see. As for the pyramids of Egypt, Cairo with its 20 million plus souls now has them surrounded, and there is some guy who can sit on the deck of his condo and ponder the Riddle of the Sphinx at near eye level when not chatting with the neighbors. A member of our group did get her picture taken on a camel, but the owner of the beast charged her several euros and also managed to steal her hat. As for me, I got wheeled out to have my picture taken with the pyramids as a backdrop, but as the temperature was about 110°, I managed to last all of 90 seconds before being lifted back into the air-conditioned bus.

The countries of the former Soviet Union along the Black Sea left a very different impression, but also provided new insights. In college, I studied Marx and Hegel but was never able to fathom "dialectal materialism," the philosophical basis of Communism. However, I may understand it now. I think it means, "doing a lot of talking while watching everything fall into a state of disrepair." There is also nothing artful in any of the Soviet era construction, and the central planners surely looked around one day at the "proletarian ugly" society they had created, concluding the whole sad enterprise was beyond saving.

It could, of course, be my age or current state of disability, but all of this leads me to conclude that with all of this country's problems and imperfections, there's no place like home.