Stories and News No. 1119
Once upon a time the classic bad day.
Maybe it's today.
Let's be exactly now, the case.
Yours and mine.
In fact, make it worse, imagine a whole period, months, even years.
Take those moments.
Then, open the palm of your hand and place them in the middle.
Observe that pile of minutes when the world rolls like a bowling ball aiming straight at you, the only skittle in the field, helpless before a grim and insensitive destiny.
It happens to you, me, everybody.
Not for a matter of chronic depression, let it be clear.
Let’s not bring doctors and medicines into play.
Do the same with any pretext to close our eyes and our brains before the possibilities, a very holy word.
You might say: “I'm still a teenager, can you realize? Do you understand what kind of society you welcomed me into? Is it my fault of what I found at the very beginning of my days? Will you comprehend why does it bother me?”
Yeah, I see.
Indeed, let's see together, and let’s assume that you could even reply: “Sorry, did you really see me? Did you get how the real winners are made out - or better, up there? Nature has been merciless with me as generous with them, this is the truth.”
That's right, let’s stay on the truth.
Now you could rightly jump out and try to close every discourse with the skin topic: “When my colour is disadvantaged by definition, the soul inside is condemned to a life sentence of literal obscurity.”
It can be, for sure it happens.
As much as it is normal that you might be upset with understandable susceptibility, offering as a non-negligible argument: a gender identity not foreseen by the current moral script.
You are all right, from your point of view, and if all this were not enough, at any moment the punctual seller of better times could appear and after a predictably optimistic words’ game he would show you the usual way.
Read also as the long and hard road of courageous patience.
“No,” you would refuse, “I exist now. And it's time for me to smile.”
“I don’t have any more survivors seconds in my pocket,” you could think with reasonable resignation.
Well, with just as much clarity you should know that Eddie Ndopu’s story is not a fable invented at a desk to reconcile crafts.
On the contrary, it’s a written, told and certainly lived experience with an absolute knowledge of living crudities.
When he was only two years old Eddie was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy.
"He will not survive to five," the doctor told his mother.
Nonetheless, Eddie won.
But he didn’t do it because today he is still here with us and he is twenty-seven years old.
Not because he was the first African with a disability to graduate from the University of Oxford.
Not because he became a global ambassador for humanity and inclusion.
And not even because, besides being young and disabled, he is also black and homosexual.
Eddie triumphed because he fortunately understood that he was - his exact words - "a living manifestation of possibility."
As is each of us is, every day we have left...
“90% of children with a disability across the developing world don’t have access to education … I don’t want us to just have the ramp, I want us to have the whole building.”
Eddie Ndopu
Read more diversity stories
Buy my English Italian, dual language books
Listen my music band
Watch my last storytelling show with English and Italian subtitles Sunset
Storytelling videos with subtitles
Once upon a time the classic bad day.
Maybe it's today.
Let's be exactly now, the case.
Yours and mine.
In fact, make it worse, imagine a whole period, months, even years.
Take those moments.
Then, open the palm of your hand and place them in the middle.
Observe that pile of minutes when the world rolls like a bowling ball aiming straight at you, the only skittle in the field, helpless before a grim and insensitive destiny.
It happens to you, me, everybody.
Not for a matter of chronic depression, let it be clear.
Let’s not bring doctors and medicines into play.
Do the same with any pretext to close our eyes and our brains before the possibilities, a very holy word.
You might say: “I'm still a teenager, can you realize? Do you understand what kind of society you welcomed me into? Is it my fault of what I found at the very beginning of my days? Will you comprehend why does it bother me?”
Yeah, I see.
Indeed, let's see together, and let’s assume that you could even reply: “Sorry, did you really see me? Did you get how the real winners are made out - or better, up there? Nature has been merciless with me as generous with them, this is the truth.”
That's right, let’s stay on the truth.
Now you could rightly jump out and try to close every discourse with the skin topic: “When my colour is disadvantaged by definition, the soul inside is condemned to a life sentence of literal obscurity.”
It can be, for sure it happens.
As much as it is normal that you might be upset with understandable susceptibility, offering as a non-negligible argument: a gender identity not foreseen by the current moral script.
You are all right, from your point of view, and if all this were not enough, at any moment the punctual seller of better times could appear and after a predictably optimistic words’ game he would show you the usual way.
Read also as the long and hard road of courageous patience.
“No,” you would refuse, “I exist now. And it's time for me to smile.”
“I don’t have any more survivors seconds in my pocket,” you could think with reasonable resignation.
Well, with just as much clarity you should know that Eddie Ndopu’s story is not a fable invented at a desk to reconcile crafts.
On the contrary, it’s a written, told and certainly lived experience with an absolute knowledge of living crudities.
When he was only two years old Eddie was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy.
"He will not survive to five," the doctor told his mother.
Nonetheless, Eddie won.
But he didn’t do it because today he is still here with us and he is twenty-seven years old.
Not because he was the first African with a disability to graduate from the University of Oxford.
Not because he became a global ambassador for humanity and inclusion.
And not even because, besides being young and disabled, he is also black and homosexual.
Eddie triumphed because he fortunately understood that he was - his exact words - "a living manifestation of possibility."
As is each of us is, every day we have left...
“90% of children with a disability across the developing world don’t have access to education … I don’t want us to just have the ramp, I want us to have the whole building.”
Eddie Ndopu
On the same topic:
Read more diversity stories
Buy my English Italian, dual language books
Listen my music band
Watch my last storytelling show with English and Italian subtitles Sunset
Storytelling videos with subtitles