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recent performance took place on a makeshift open-air stage using only the simplest of props in a pendhopo (hall) attached to a subdistrict office on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. The performers included teachers, traders, activists, housewives and the unemployed, with varying backgrounds, characters, needs and aspirations.

The common denominator among them was that they had all been informants for a work of participatory research conducted by Ekawati Liu, a PhD candidate from Deakin University in Australia, into the livelihood choices of Indonesian villagers with disabilities. In Indonesia, they often refer themselves to as difabel, derived from the English term differently-abled.

The performance and the follow-up discussion in Sleman was the culmination of a project organized by the Peduli Program, with a five-day workshop held at the office of the Sasana Integrasi dan Advokasi Difabel (SIGAB) or Institute for Integration and Advocacy of the Difabled, an NGO established in 2003 to defend and fight for the rights of the difabled throughout Indonesia and to ensure their full integration into society.

The workshop was facilitated by Joned Suryatmoko — a theater director, playwright, community facilitator and researcher — whose role was to manage the logistics of the process and to establish a framework by which the participants could explore and express their experiences while allowing participants the autonomy to shape their own performance.

The performance comprised two acts. The first involved villagers with hearing impairments describing their difficulties in accessing effective hearing aids and other assistive equipment. They described to the audience how this affected their ability to participate in their local community. The second act portrayed the story of a young man raising chickens who needed a loan to expand his business.

When the financial institution’s field officers visited him to inspect his business, they learned he was blind. Without ever referring to his disability, they found various barely plausible excuses to refuse the loan. The young man’s story had no resolution, leaving the audience to engage in a lively discussion to determine how society could better support people with disabilities.

In order for the participants to be able to produce a story that reflected their aspirations and concerns as a group, they first had to become aware of their shared interests and common concerns. This was not always obvious, as each group member had developed their own means for dealing with their own life.

For example, while the fiercely independent 70-year old Mbah (grandfather) Muji had previously participated in village-level disabled people’s groups, he barely seemed to accept that the label “disabled” applied to him. Sure, he was completely blind, but he was an active professional musician, he was able to climb trees to harvest coconuts, and he had worked as a masseur. He felt he was able to support himself without assistance.

It might not have been easy for him to see what he had in common with Ibu Karyati who had previously been hospitalized and medicated for schizophrenia and who had periods where she felt unable to interact with others or look after herself.

While Mbah Muji’s rejection of the stigmatizing label “disabled” reflected his strong belief that he was a full member of his community, it might also have limited his ability to work with others who faced similar issues.

For the group to perform a story that was their story, each performer had first to reflect on her or his own personal story and to become aware of how this story intersected with those of the others in the group. Through a group brainstorming session, they worked in small groups with photographs and visual prompts, with the pictures and images described in detail to those who were visually impaired.

The participants were invited to use these prompts to define their circumstances, the circumstances to which they aspired, and the obstacles they faced in achieving these aspirations.

Through this process, the participants came to agree that the biggest challenge in relating to their communities was the perception that disabled people cannot work or be productive. However, everyone agreed that work and productive opportunities were exactly what the members need to address their exclusion from the community.

The group collectively formulated a single short sentence summarizing their frustration: “Justru karena aku difabel, aku harus bekerja.” (It’s because we are disabled that we need work). To express this idea dramatically, the group crafted the story of the young man raising chickens, whose inability to expand his business had nothing to do with the fact that he was blind, and everything to do with the fact that the financial institution’s field officers assumed he would not be successful because he was blind.

When I asked the participants if any of them had ever applied for credit themselves and had their applications rejected, they all shook their heads. They all described struggling to establish their own businesses with limited available resources, sometimes using soft loans or small gifts of money or other resources provided by family members or members of the surrounding community, sometimes just building on the fruits of their own labor.

None had ever applied for a loan from a formal institution. Dian, the bubbly village activist, said: “I think most difabled people just think there is no point applying, so we work out other ways of doing things.”

The story the group presented was not so much about what had happened to any of them, but what they feared or believed would happen. So I asked Dian if she thought maybe she or other members of the group might be more confident about applying for a loan after joining the workshop and the performance, if it had given them the courage they needed to face their fears.

She smiled and shook her head doubtfully: “It’s not just about our attitude. Our attitude can only change if other people’s attitudes change too.” I asked if she thought performing the group’s play could help change attitudes of the broader community.

And now she laughed outright at the naivete of my question. “I hope so. But it’s just a small step. It’s part of an ongoing process. It won’t change anything unless we keep on pushing to make things change.”
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