I live in a small city in Italy, Forlì. Although Italy is a progressive country about disability (for some of its laws) I experienced the fact that a few people can really manage to have a honest confrontation with disabled people. We fear what we don't know and this is known but I think we also fear what we can't accept.. And is really hard to accept that the physical pain we see in those people could have been our pain.. Because of course some disabilities come from diseases but not all of them, sometimes is no one fault and this can be even more painful to accept.
I have always been around disables people; my dad used to work in a cooperative that give jobs to people with disability so I grew up in this kind of environment and I'm confortable with that. For some years now I have been volunteering in an association that, I think, offer an amazing service: it organizes free time. I think is an incredible service because we sometimes forget that people like them have our similar needs of fun and laugh. So during the weekends I use my free time in an amazing way and we have pizza togheter (let's remember we are italian!), we go to the cinema or bowling, sometimes we even go dancing in the discos! And people that see us, they're very surprised at firts because is not very common to see bunch of disabled people hanging out all togheter but you can see from their faces that they start to think about them in a brand new way. So what I?m trying to say is that maybe this can seems unneccessary, something that we can avoid and no one would say anything but I assure you that I have not found yet a better way to include disabled people in society.