When Associated Students, Inc. intern Casey Burkard left the office for upper campus yesterday, she knew it wouldn’t be her regular 5-minute walk to the library.
The uphill path from the USU to the library became exponentially more intimidating, and the stairs and escalators on the way lost their convenience.
Although Burkard is a healthy student, she was confined to a wheelchair as a part of the Disabled Student Services’ Walk a Day in Our Shoes event. Burkard and other ASI members volunteered to act disabled for Tuesday morning to gain insight into the daily lives of disabled students.
“I’ve never been so thankful to walk,” Burkard told an audience in the Anatol Center yesterday afternoon.
“It is 100 times harder to do basic, basic things,” said ASI president Erin Swetland, who wore a blindfold and used a blind walking stick as she made her way through campus.
Jeff Klaus, director of Student Life and Development, was also blind for the day — a fact that significantly complicated his hour-and-a-half-long workshop. Klaus had to ask his audience to fill him in on what the PowerPoint slides on the screen behind him said.
As for the rest of the day, “It took substantially longer to get places because I was completely disoriented,” Klaus said. “You hear skateboards coming and they buzz right by you. When you see, there’s a little more comfort.”
Brian Troutner, ASI treasurer, who wore sound-absorbing earmuffs, found the life of a deaf student frustrating.
“No one would take the time to talk to me,” Troutner said.
He commented on how maddening it was to have people talk slower to him or avoided making contact with him altogether.
Disabled Student Services gave Stephen Tran, who works for ASI communications, headphones and a portable CD player containing a soundtrack of sporadic voices representative of the unwanted thoughts plaguing schizophrenics to listen to for the day.
“It was intense, very intense,” Tran said. “All that you hear is just really negative thoughts … you really don’t know how to cope with it.”
He said that, after a while, he began to “fall in” to what he heard.
“It just plants a lot of thoughts in your head,” Tran said.
Walking around campus, Tran would suddenly hear things like “Don’t look at that woman. She might be the FBI, she might be out to get you and steal your thoughts.”
“It’s just really, really negative,” Tran said. “There’s so much paranoia it boggles your mind.”
All the participants said they gained a new appreciation of what disabled students have to cope with.
“It was touching, you could feel that they really had a true understanding of what it was like,” said Deaka McClain, ASI secretary of disability affairs and organizer of the event. “I just wanted them to have a different mindset about a person who has a disability, to look at the person first and the disability second.