CVTC speaker shares thoughts on disabilities

SWEET BRIAR — If you haven’t experienced disability from a family perspective, says Al Condeluci, wait awhile. You will.

The experience might come with your own health or through an aging parent, uncle or aunt.

Your perspective will change.

For Condeluci, an author, teacher and human services professional, the experience that shaped his life began when he was a child and watched saw his cousin, Carol, cope with Down syndrome. Later, shortly after becoming a professional, he met David, a man with cerebral palsy.

“Each of us has a story in our life that got us here, ” Condeluci said, speaking Monday at the two-day Fall Conference for human services professionals, sponsored by the Central Virginia Training Center.

“When we look around and see someone being treated or mistreated,” he said, “you roll up your sleeves and jump in. There’s something in our core about injustice.”

Condeluci, who holds a master’s in social work and a doctorate in education, is also CEO of a human services agency in Pittsburgh, Pa.

As a child, Condeluci said he didn’t realize how devalued as a person his cousin was until he went to school, and she didn’t.

As she got older and out in the community, people would make fun of her or play jokes on her, and she would cry.

A self-described street kid, Condeluci learned that there was more than one way to fight — the other was through advocacy.

“I knew I wanted to help people, like Carol, live full, useful lives.”

Human services professionals go into the field to help, and not for the money, he said.

Disabled people are often characterized as being unable to work, or in need of care or medicine. Some are made to believe they are being punished by God.

He recalled recently hearing a woman whose son had been brain damaged in an accident. “I told (him) that if he continued to drink and drive, ‘God would get him.’”

That is a centuries-old, still powerful notion that people struggle with, Condeluci said.

Condeluci has lived in two group homes and didn’t like either — one was a college dormitory, and the other a barracks.

“Group living is not fun, especially when you’re living with someone assigned to you,” he said. “This is not as good as it gets. It’s not what you want for yourself.”

The medical model of separating the ill and treating them works for that purpose, he said, but Down syndrome can’t be fixed, nor can a disability like cerebral palsy — those are conditions people live with and don’t require separation.

The way society perceives the person can be changed by laws and by individual relationships, he said. The result can be a more inclusive community, not one that focuses on difference.

With his newly minted master’s in social work, Condeluci was hired to work in a 2,000-bed facility. On his first day, he was looking at the directional map in the main foyer, when he heard a guttural sound and turned to see a man in a wheelchair beckoning him.

The man couldn’t speak and his hands were deformed, but on his wheelchair he had a lapboard with the alphabet drawn on it.

He had difficulty controlling his hands but he spelled out “Hi.”

“My name is David, what’s yours?”

Condeluci told him.

“Do you work here?” David spelled out. And Condeluci said yes, it was his first day.

“Get me the hell out of here,” spelled out David.

Condeluci came to know David as “one of the smartest men I’ve ever met in my life, encased in a body that just didn’t work.” And eventually, he did get him discharged.

Both his cousin, Carol, and his friend, David, have since passed away, but memories of them “continue to guide me in my work.”

Today’s session begins at 9 a.m.