| Negotiating Washington BY MIKE UNGER The doors to a Red Line Metro train slide open, and a mob of passengers file like zombies into the car. Stephanie Birmingham is among the people heading downtown this cold spring morning, but for the 19-year-old sophomore, traveling—seemingly second nature to this crowd of bleary-eyed commuters—is never simple. 
Photo by Jeff Watts
Stephanie Birmingham Birmingham is one of three Washington Semester students with disabilities who use wheelchairs, the most the program’s ever hosted at one time. Birmingham and her friend, junior Jessica Manier, came to Washington from St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisc., for many of the same reasons the AU program attracts students from throughout the country. They were seeking a true Washington experience. But the pair also wanted to see whether the nation’s capital, the global leader in so many arenas, was a standard-setter when it comes to accessibility for people with disabilities. After a few months in the District, their verdict is mostly positive—but far from perfect. “The public transportation is a huge plus,” says Birmingham as she steers her electric wheelchair north on Wisconsin Avenue toward the Tenleytown Metro station. “I can be really independent here. I can do whatever I want.” Every Monday and Tuesday Birmingham, a political science major, takes the train downtown to her internship at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. It’s usually a smooth trip, except for when the Metro elevators are broken—an all-too-common
occurrence. “If you go to a Metro station and the elevator is out, able bodied people use the escalator or climb the stairs,” Manier says. “We have to get back on the train and go to the next station to take a shuttle.” That’s obviously a big-time hassle. There have been instances where Birmingham, when faced with a broken Metro elevator, elected to take the bus instead. But that’s not always a surefire alternative. Occasionally the wheelchair lift on the bus is broken, or even worse, the driver does not know how to operate it. It would be enough to drive anyone batty, but Birmingham, a positive person with a generally sunny disposition, has learned to cope. Born with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic bone disorder characterized by brittle bones that break easily, Birmingham’s movement has been hampered her entire life. “I get frustrated and angry, but then I just deal with it,” she says. “I don’t mean to say that I have a hundred things to fight about, but I have to be wise in choosing my battles.” During a class trip to the Supreme Court this semester, the women couldn’t find an entrance with electronic door buttons. When Birmingham asked a police officer where they were located, he said he didn’t know. As the class made its way through the city, Birmingham noticed that a police cruiser was parked in front of the curb cut she was approaching, blocking her access. Unable to cross the street, she was momentarily separated from her classmates. These are precisely the kinds of issues that prompted Birmingham and Manier, who has cerebral palsy, to found Friends for Wheels, an advocacy organization dedicated to raising awareness about people with disabilities at St. Norbert College and beyond. “There are residence halls [at St. Norbert] we can’t even get into,” Birmingham says. “It’s hard because we can’t go there to socialize. We just want people to be comfortable with us.” Birmingham says that on the whole she’s been very happy with her ability to negotiate the AU campus and Washington in general. She’s visited the monuments and museums, and counts Eastern Market as one of her favorite spots in the city. Deftly steering her wheelchair out of the crowded subway car and onto the platform, Birmingham marvels at her newfound confidence and independence. Just two years ago she felt great trepidation about leaving her small hometown in Wisconsin for college. Now, she was seamlessly making her way to work with thousands of other harried people in the most powerful city in the world. “It’s a much faster pace here,” she says. “I’ve been more aggressive in making sure that I get where I need to go. But for the most part people have been great about getting doors and doing things like that.” Washington Semester was actually a compromise between Birmingham and her parents. She wanted to spend a year abroad, a prospect that worried them. “Now that I’ve been here and shown I can actually survive,” she says while weaving her way through the masses on K Street, “maybe I’ll bring that up again.” |
