By Gaurav Aung

My home country, Myanmar, is most distinctly third-world in the support it provides for people with disabilities. During my time volunteering at the Insein Blind School in the outskirts of Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, I experienced first-hand the lack of care and effort put into cultivating a safe, inclusive environment for some of the most vulnerable members of society. In the classroom itself, where I helped teach blind students English, basic necessities such as stationary, books and desks were hard to come by. Because of the frail political fabric of the country, there was scarce government support and the institution was more or less on its own.

I went about talking to different students and staff of the school, all visually impaired, asking them about their origins and their time at the blind school. From being abandoned by one’s own family to being discriminated against one’s entire life, the stories were a damning indictment on Burmese society and culture at large. Institutions such as the Insein blind school, although providing an all-important haven for the visually impaired, serve as a political and social excuse to isolate vulnerable parts of society.

My experience at Insein Blind School also made me reassess my own misconceptions about disability, formed largely due to my engagement with contemporary media. I realized how the ultimate form of empowerment revolved around actually listening to and documenting lived experiences of people with disabilities. Back home, helping people with disabilities is mostly seen as a philanthropic means to a social end: the focus is on the moral reward gained and the raising of one’s social status as a result of making donations to institutions like Insein blind school. The actual process of helping and helping underserved communities is shunned aside for personal gain.

As a result, it feels only natural that the project I’m working on for Art Spark Texas focuses on documenting and digitizing stories from their Actual Lives performances between the years 2000-2010. The stories shed light on the lived experience of people with disabilities, unadulterated by the ableist bias you often see when similar stories are paraphrased and warped into inspiration porn for the media. Be it in the form of performance pieces, musicals or ensembles, they encapsulate within them the humanity of people with disabilities, the recognition of which is severely lacking in public discourse. They reject the reductionist narrative that serves to boil down complex, multifaceted people into merely their disabilities. If social justice and equity is to be achieved, the broader public has to be cognizant of these stories and lived experiences, and the project I’m working on is a step forward towards this end.

I am Gaurav Aung, a sophomore at Bennington College studying Literature and Mathematics. I spend my time watching movies, reading books and either traveling or dreaming about travel.