Every day I take the children to school: A. to kindergarten and M. to primary school, which, for those of us who are a bit further along in years, are what used to be called nursery school and elementary school. The names have changed at school but it is the situations that can make the difference. It is not by changing names that we create better environments.
Where A. and M. go, something different exists: the school principal, through her long tenure at this school, has tried to ensure that the school is a place for everyone, without distinctions.
When you arrive at school and look around, you find yourself before a world so varied, so colorful, so rich in signs that we do not know, or that we may have seen perhaps on television or in a film: and you find them near you, in front of you, beside you.
On the walls are hung posters with drawings that you discover are signs of other languages spoken in nations far away from which the inhabitants of the country come.
When you wait for the children to come out of school you see people in clothing that speaks of distant cultures. Pakistani mothers wear the salwar kameez, a tunic down to the knee over a pair of pants and on their head a light scarf. All in a myriad of bright colors. Arab mothers wear the veil and love dark colors. African mothers wear the bright colors of their lands of origin, sometimes with elaborate headdresses, but made only with a piece of fabric, enriched with what to us seem like shawls or scarves.
Some fathers, especially on Fridays, wear long garments like priest's robes but usually white or cream or blue. Others wear work overalls with the logo of their workshop. The children by now dress in the Western style but are distinguished by their hairstyles. Among them stand out the small Sikhs who have their heads covered with a square cloth scarf, well pulled around the head, which highlights a sort of ball on the top of the head: it hides a small chignon of hair, which, from birth onward, is never cut.
African girls, on the other hand, are a celebration of braids.
In this waiting time you see small groups of people who find each other and speak their mother tongue, with the gestures and movements typical of their way of communicating: the restraint of Orientals, the forthright speech of Arabs, the movements and loud tones of Africans, the gesticulation of Italians.
While you observe, this people of such diverse persons watches you: they watch our clothes, the shirt or jacket, the tie or the tattoos on the arms of some fathers, the shoes with high thin heels, the small bags, the short skirts, the bermuda shorts. And meanwhile they listen to our conversations, our way of speaking. You look at me that I appear so different to you and you look at me that I appear so different to you. We experience the exact same situation. We look at the things that distinguish us, that do not belong to us. At this point we have the possibility of making a choice: to take the path of distance and separation, or to travel the path of encounter.
The children come out of school: they run, they greet each other, they make plans for the next day, they tease each other. No one asks the other: why are you different from me? They feel themselves to be children. Period. Where they come from, how they dress, what language they speak, what culture they are, which God they believe in, for them it is not an obstacle to feeling like children who go to the same school, who have the same teachers, who learn the same subjects, who play the same games. In a school that respects diversity and does not force conformity, diversity becomes a value and at the same time a norm: it loses the characteristic of exceptionality and becomes equal possibility. It is not surprising then that in this environment, the 'diversity' of disabled children is only one element of the whole.
At the playground some child asked me "why is M. like this?": I said that he was born "like that". It took nothing more for M.'s classmates to play with him, tease him, play tricks on him, involve him, give him a drawing for his birthday, get on stage with him at school. A.'s classmates gave themselves the explanation that A. does not walk and so uses a wheelchair. Period. The little feeding tube too had only the meaning of being useful to A. What matters to them is whether A. goes to school or not and if he is sick and when he comes back.
In this school where an attitude of welcome and inclusion of cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity has been promoted, diversity is only a point of view, a gaze that does not prevent me from seeing the people I meet. Whether a person has a turban on their head, or wears a tie, whether they have pale skin or the color of ebony, whether they are in a wheelchair or are deaf, is no different from me who have white hair on my head.
Claudio Roncoroni, 2011
