GOMA, Congo (AP) — When Pope Francis arrives in Congo and South Sudan next week, thousands of people will take note of a more down-to-earth gesture than the sign of the cross. From their wheelchairs, they will understand how he uses it.
The pope, who began using a wheelchair last year, will visit two countries where years of conflict have left many disabled, but which are among the furthest behind in the world in terms of accessibility and understanding. His visit will encourage Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
“We know it is suffering, but it comforts us to see a great personality like the pope use a wheelchair,” said Paul Mitemberezi, a market vendor in Goma, in the heart of the eastern Congo region, threatened by dozens of armed groups. “Sometimes it gives us the courage to hope that this is not the end of the world and one can survive.”
Mitemberezi, a Catholic and father, was disabled at the age of three due to a bout of polio. He supports his family with his work and does not conceive of being a beggar. On the way to the market, his three-wheeled chair creaks as it passes over the stones of unpaved paths. There is no ramp at his house, forcing him to leave his brightly colored chair outside, risking it being stolen.
Every morning when he goes out to play basketball, he makes sure the chair is still there before he drags himself out. “It’s my legs, it helps me live,” she said. He applies a bicycle pump to inflate the tires and sets off, making his way between the trucks and motorbikes.
Pope Francis is still adjusting to a life that Mitemberezi has long accepted. She was first seen in public in a wheelchair in May with an associate pushing her. The 86-year-old pope never pushes it himself. He sometimes walks with a cane, but uses a chair to travel long distances and has a chair lift to get on and off planes.
Francis insists that mobility limitations do not affect his ability to be pope, because “one leads with the head, not with the knees.” He deplores the “culture of dispossession” that marginalizes people with disabilities. In his travels around the world, he visits places that care for the disabled and provide health care, particularly to people in wheelchairs at the end of their general audiences.
“No disability – temporary, acquired or permanent – can alter the fact that we are all children of the same Father and enjoy the same dignity,” Francis wrote in his annual UN International Day of Persons with Disabilities message in December. People with different abilities enrich the Church and teach it to be more humanitarian, he said.
