Voice: Indiana History Project [Instrumental
music begins]
Indiana Institute on Disability and Community
Indiana University
Putting Self-Advocacy Skills to Use
Darcus Nims
Darcus Nims: Me and Betty, we asked to
go to a conference in Washington, DC again.
This time, we didn't have no helpers.
We could go on our own.
Voice: Betty Williams
Betty Williams: And we thought we knew where
we were going.
And we thought we had all the information,
but we didn't when we got there.
We were under
the impression that somebody was picking us
up at
the airport.
Well, when they didn't show up
we started getting nervous, but we sit there
and we
tried to figure out well what are we going
to
do next.
And what we decided was that we sit
there for about an hour to see if the people
would show up, and they never showed up.
Darcus Nims: I had some money on my calling
card.
I kept on calling all these hotels and stuff
and see if they had someone -- had us registered.
Nobody had us registered.
Betty Williams: So then we decided to get
a cab and just to go somewhere close to the
Metro so
that we could get on one of the Metro trains
the next day.
We just kept walking until we
found a hotel that we thought fit what we
needed.
So we -- I had at the time credit card
so we used our -- we used my credit card to
get
a room.
And so the next day we got up and
tried to call the number that we had for the
people that was supposed to pick us up.
And
they were already gone so we had to find -- we
had to -- they -- there were some people there
were
still some people there that told us to just
go to the Metro and to -- that we would see
people with disabilities on the Metro so to
just
follow people with disabilities then we'd
find the rally that we were supposed to be
at.
Well, we did that and we were able to find
--
at least find the rally that we were supposed
to go to.
Darcus Nims: And that -- then, we got there
to get our home and got booked into a
storm [laughter].
And then we had to
switch planes and stuff because the plane
that was supposed to take us wasn't going
to take us home and stuff.
But, if we didn't know about self-advocates
and
how to do this and stuff, we wouldn't know
how to book a hotel or how to get to the place
we were having the conference and stuff
like that because we always depend on our
helpers and stuff, and -- or depend on other
people to help us.
There was nobody there to help us.
We had to depend on ourselves, something that
nobody thought we could do.
Really, we didn't think we could do it ourselves
and we thought -- we were shocked we did it.
Betty Williams: You know, we knew, we know
that if we hadn't had self-advocacy skills
that we wouldn't have been able to survive
that because we -- we were really scared
because we didn't know what to do.
We were
ready to go back home.
We were ready to get
back on the plane and go home, but the airport
told us we couldn't go home because we had
to wait until the next day to get our plane
tickets.
So we really did have to rely on the
skills that we had learned to be able to survive
that night.
So I mean we always tell people
that we credit self-advocacy for that because
we learned how to rely on ourselves and have
confidence in who we are and what we believe
in through self-advocacy.
Voice: Music, Redwood Trail [Instrumental
music begins]
Produced by Indiana Institute on Disability
and Community Center for Health Equity
Funded in part by the
Indiana Governor's Council for People with
Disabilities
Copyright 2018 The Trustees of Indiana University
[Instrumental music ends]
