Recently for a class assignment we had to watch a movie called “Emmanuel’s Gift” and answer a few question, here are my thought from this assignment.

Before I give my actual thoughts I share a quick summary.

This movie is basically a documentary about a man named Emmanuel who has a disability were only one of his legs have grown to full size. We follow him and get to hear him explain all the trials and tribulations he faces as a disabled person in Ghana. Not even a couple minutes into the film we soon learn how disheartening it can be to be a person with a disability in his community. These individuals are looked at as cursed by the sins of their parents, lazy and mere beggars. Emmanuel talks about how his father abandoned him and his mom from the day he was born due to his disability and we hear stories of how his mother took care of him all on her own. Unfortunately his mother would fall ill leading Emmanuel to fend for his family by shinning shoes before school. When that wasn’t enough he decided he would leave school and go to city for either a better job, better pay, or both. When he got to the city he saw how people just like him were dwindled to begging on the streets for money. In his effort to never have to stoop to that level in his life he decided to go on a bike run across Ghana to bring attention to the disabled community.

At this point you might be thinking “What is a bike ride across the country really going to do for the cause?” and I truly thought the same thing but it did much more than you could imagine. This bike ride inspired so many people and brought a lot of people together in not only his community but in the entire country and other countries as well by showing people there was much more to the disabled community than most people think. The USA would later invite him over to take part in other bike runs, get a prosthetics leg, accept some awards, and meet other people like him that were trying to encourage the same change on how the disabled community was viewed one sport or marathon at a time.

I will stop here because I actually want the you all to go watch the movie because I honestly think it is amazing. There is so much more that is not in this short summary. If you do end up wanting to watch this movie you can find it on Kanopy and I believe prime video. If you are a current Georgia State student Kanopy is free.

My overall thoughts on the movie is that it is truly inspiring. It makes you feel grateful but at the same time it’s like dang if he’s doing all that with one leg why am I, with my two, not even getting up to walk to a store down the street. But I am mostly grateful, and it’s not because I have both my legs but rather because there are motivated people in the world that will
fight and bring light to issues like this to better the lives of the people of future generations.

This movie does a great job of illustrating the social model of disability in the way the citizens of Ghana acted towards people with disability by thinking they were cursed or insulting them. To me the lack of access and inclusion was the main point of the movie. Because we could see how people where literally left to beg on the streets for money because no one would hire them, they didn’t have any actuals tools like wheelchairs or crutches to get around, and kids weren’t given the opportunity to go to school just because they were disabled.

There were three things that stood out to me the most in this movie but I will only share 2 because the 3rd is a spoiler.

The first thing is when the movie first began, there was a man talking about something that I believed was called “seeoff”. This caught my attention because for another assignment in the class I am doing a one pager on Sierra Leone and in my research for it I came across an interview with a lady that had a son with down syndrome. She told the interviewee a heart-breaking story of how people would call her son “devil boy”, how no one wanted to help her raise the child not even her own family, and how she was harassed for years to do the ritual of “giving the child back to devil” so to speak. The people in her community went as far as to blame the boy for his sister’s death because they were triplets, but he was the only one who survived. She eventually ended up giving in and tried to do the ritual twice. Luckily what they thought would happen didn’t so people, or at least her family, saw that they were wrong and acting upon unhinged belief systems. Of course I simplified the story for this explanation but this shows that it is not just one country in this world that thinks this way.

The second thing is I never got how some people can be so cruel to others for something that they literally can understand. Like for example the people that make fun of or insult disabled people for begging will be the same people who own shops and not hire someone just because they are disabled. You can’t call disabled people lazy or anything of the sort if you yourself are one of the reason this phenomenon is present. Also why are you mad at me because I was born different. Like people do every and anything to make themselves feel better about who they are.