When in a recent interview Daniela Bas told me that she had been blessed with the most wonderful parents in the world, it would have been difficult to argue with the 54-year-old Italian-born and raised director of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), an organ of the U.N. which, among its other major responsibilities, is charged with protecting the rights of people with disabilities.
“My parents never saw me as a child with a disability but rather as a person who could overcome any challenge,” said Bas, who when 6 years old was stricken with a then almost always fatal cancer of the spine, which caused her to become paraplegic. This permanent condition struck Bas just 20 days before Italian doctors performed the delicate spinal surgery that would save her life.
“As I grew up,” Bas reflected, “I felt very lucky to have survived rather than feeling bitter about my physical restrictions. ... My belief about why I survived eventually became that life knew I had a mission. And, of course, my parents always encouraged me to see my life that way.”
Five months after the 6-year-old was told she would never be able to walk again, that mission would begin with the help of her parents. Despite her new challenges, her mother, Maria, and father, Silviano, wanted her to go to the same local school in the northeastern city of Friuli she was supposed to attend before becoming ill.
When told by school authorities that government rules prohibited children with disabilities to attend regular school with nondisabled children, her parents employed a form of gentle persuasion to convince them to overlook the rules. “My parents are totally nonconfrontational people, so they never argued with the school heads,” Bas stated.
“Rather'' she continued, ”they softly projected with the inner energy that comes from being a devoted and loving parent their belief that I had the strength, ability, and drive to succeed in their school. They let them know that I was the same child in my heart, feelings, and personality that I had been before I was in a wheelchair.” Agreeing to put the rules aside, the authorities allowed Bas to attend their school.
While some of the days from those school years from kindergarten through high school were not always happy, she views her total educational experience as being positive. “The culture in Europe in the 1960s regarding a person with a disability was different than it is today. There were days I remember not being treated kindly by some classmates, and I still remember a teacher in elementary school who couldn’t hide her feelings that I didn’t belong in the school.”
