BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – Mauro Sorbellini, 41, pushes himself in his wheelchair while his wife walks by his side, resting a hand on his shoulder. It is a common scene of a common couple that have just finished dropping their son off at school, except for one detail. Sorbellini, who has spent more than 20 years in a wheelchair after he fell out of a tree and became paralyzed, must fight every day to complete routine tasks like this.
Sorbellini’s body betrays his efforts to navigate Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, which is not designed to accommodate the disabled. He has strong shoulders and arms, while his thin legs rest on the footrests of his wheelchair.
Moving around in his wheelchair, he takes his children to the park, goes shopping, and can even climb and descend stairs by clinging to the handrail. He also works in a government office that provides medicine to people who can’t afford it, and he and his wife recently had a baby, who is 3 months old.
“It doesn’t seem to me that the chair is an obstacle to forming a couple,” Sorbellini says.
Sorbellini and his wife met four years ago when a mutual friend introduced them. She lived in a city in the interior of the country with her two children – a daughter, now 14, and a son, now 6.
“I fell in love with them, and I brought them to live with me,” says Sorbellini, sitting in an armchair in their home as their 6-year-old son rides around the living room in Sorbellini’s wheelchair, as if it were a toy car. “We formed a family. The kids are my children.”
Inside the house, everything is normal: the conversation, the light that enters through the large window, the smell of homemade cake, the boy spinning around in the chair. But outside the house, Sorbellini has behind him a long history of fighting to assert his rights in the city, a fight that once earned him the nickname “the boy of the ramp.”
More than 17 years ago, he and his parents filed a lawsuit against the consortium of the building in which they lived because the neighbors refused to construct a ramp that would allow him to access the building. The case had a lot of public significance, and, thanks to the lawsuit, every new construction project here is now obliged to consider access for people with different capabilities. Remodeling projects must also take accessibility into account.
“What generates problems for you is that the chair is visible,” Sorbellini says. “If you see a [person who has had a] transplant, maybe you don’t realize it, [although the person] probably has more problems in relation to the amount of medication that one has to take.”
But he says the wheelchair creates more of a stigma, remembering the attitude of his former neighbors.
“The chair is more visual and more startling,” he says. “It generates loves and hates for you. It wakes up sensations in others. There are people who love you, who want to help you, and there are people who hate you. I can’t know how another feels when they see me, but yes, I know how they react.”
Disabled people living in Buenos Aires say they face physical and cultural barriers on a daily basis – from a lack of elevators at subway stations to a lack of respect from fellow citizens. Government advisers on the issue emphasize education as the key to ensuring handicapped people receive the rights they deserve. The government has laws and initiatives in place to improve access to buildings and transportation, and it is working on implementing them. A recent international conference held in Buenos Aires showed that the city is not alone in both its deficiencies when it comes to access as well as its efforts to fix them.
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