I met Nacho in 2020, a year that started who knows when and might never have even ended. I was on social media looking for people, groups or workshops related to disability that could help me repair my vehicle, a type of wheelchair I invented based on an electric scooter and to which I added a pair of wheels. Being that the vehicle was my invention, there was no shop or specialized technician for it, and thus the usual repair rules don\u2019t apply to its body. Every time something happens to it, even if it\u2019s something as simple as a flat tire, a long and uncertain process begins that involves different professionals (locksmiths, bicycle repairmen, scooter technicians) to find out what is wrong with it and if it will ever roll again.<\/p>\n
In the periods when the vehicle is out of service, my normality is profoundly altered, since it is one of the axes that sustains the gears of my life. Without it I can hardly go out for a walk. During the many quarantines, loneliness and misunderstanding come to visit me more often. I\u2019m not alone because I can\u2019t leave the house, nor do I feel misunderstood because of it. It is then that a simple routine fact, an obvious thing for normal people, turns into such a complex world, with such a specific, exceptional, often fragile way of functioning, that you pull back. A whole universe inside but almost no language with which to communicate with others.<\/p>\n
So loneliness and misunderstanding appear and you end up on the internet to see if you can find a bit of community and tenderness. At that moment in 2020, three years after having immigrated to Madrid from S\u00e3o Paulo, feeling like a crippled island in the middle of a pandemic, I started looking for very basic keywords, such as \u201cfunctional diversity,\u201d \u201cableness,\u201d \u201cwheelchair repair.\u201d In one of those virtual voyages, I found Nacho\u2019s Facebook page: Act with your Functional Diversity.<\/p>\n
It was an activist page. It had been a long time since I had connected to Facebook and, looking at his feed, among the many messages and related events, I found a video, a fixed camera that shows a room where Nacho emerges naked in the morning and performs his dressing routine.[1]<\/sup><\/a> https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/actuacontudiversidadfuncional<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/span>