Kindergarten
In a Genoa public kindergarten, like many others across the city, a young woman with an open, gentle face has worked for several years as a classroom aide. Her name is Paola. She is, like everyone, unique and irreplaceable. Yet she also belongs to a category: she is mentally handicapped. More specifically, she has Down syndrome — she has it, has had it, will always have it. The word itself slips: is it an illness? A disability? A stigma? A trait? A characteristic?
To her colleagues, to the children, to their parents, Paola is simply Paola.
The kindergarten also enrolls a girl named Simona. She, too, has the same physical features, the same uniqueness. She, too, has been assigned — by Nature? By God? By doctors? By specialists? By her parents? By social workers? — to the same category as Paola, and to the same subcategory: the relatives of Dr. Down.
Simona's mother watched Paola work for a long time in silence. She saw her greet children at the door, help them off with their coats, tie on their aprons, wash their hands, go down to the kitchen to help prepare meals. Watching Paola, Simona's mother shifted how she thought about her own daughter. One day she told another parent: "My husband and I finally understand what our daughter can do when she grows up."
The Grape Harvest
A Swiss educator once visited a vineyard owned by distant relatives in southern Italy. During a training course on workplace integration for people with disabilities, he told this story.
"It was harvest time on a farm thick with grapevines. The sun was still warm. There was a festival air, and hard work. Everyone pitched in willingly, picking grapes and doing other jobs. Even the farmer's son worked side by side with the other laborers.
Only later in the day did our foreign colleague notice something: the young man nobody seemed to be paying special attention to had Down syndrome.
"What is he doing here?" my colleague thought. "Shouldn't he be in some kind of specialized facility?"
I hope that by the end of this book, our readers will flip that question on its head and ask instead: "Why should he be in a specialized facility when he could be here, in a normal place, working?"