The following is an interview with Christa Bucks Camacho, who who uses a wheelchair, about her Peace Corps as an urban youth volunteer in Fernando de la Mora, Paraguay. During her two years, she worked with at-risk youth, encouraging them to stay in school.

Q: What advice do you have for individuals with disabilities who are considering applying for the Peace Corps, especially since it is an extensive process?

A: I sat in the front row of the recruiting session that the Peace Corps recruiter had organized on my campus, and I asked a million questions. Then I stayed afterwards and personally introduced myself. So I really showed right up front that I was very interested in being a volunteer and I wanted to pursue it. I completed the application promptly.

Later, when I was invited to interview, I prepared by thinking about how the Peace Corps would support my majors in Spanish and International Studies. I also took a self-assessment of my skills from things I had been involved with earlier. I really emphasized my ability to organize recreational and educational activities for children and teenagers, so my application showed heavily my Spanish ability as well as my abilities to work with children and teenagers.

During the placement process, I was confident inside that I was going to succeed and I was going to be a volunteer. I started asking the questions that people weren’t asking and providing the information that Peace Corps was having trouble asking for from me. One of the things I did was prepare a video I titled “A Day in the Life of Christa Bucks.” The video helped Peace Corps get to know me in terms of my interests and abilities as well as how I live on a daily basis. I went through my independent living skills, and I also showed them some of the work I was doing as a facilitator on a ropes challenge course. After that, I persistently followed up and that was the key to my success.

Another step in the Peace Corps placement process is passing a general health medical exam. My disability does not have to do with my health. They are two separate issues and it was difficult to explain to a bureaucratic system that my disability is separate from my general health. I was challenged to have them make that differentiation. One of the things that is debated in the development field is how people with disabilities can decide to put themselves at risk or their health at risk. Well, that’s a personal decision, I believe. I have the right to decide that I want to be in a remote village that has only dirt roads. I also need to be responsible for preparing myself for the physical and psychological challenges in order to be an effective volunteer.

Q: After you were accepted and placed in a country, what was the training experience like for you?

A: Paraguay turned out to be a perfect situation for me and that came about because I went through an extensive process to have that happen. The more specific you are in the placement process, the more successful your experience will be because you will be able to identify the kind of environment you want to be in as a volunteer. But being more specific can result in a longer placement period; I waited three years, but I ended up with an outstanding experience. I worked with young people. They gave me a ton of energy and challenged me to organize infinite activities. I like fast-paced situations, and I like to be on the move. I am very energetic, so the urban setting in Fernando de la Mora, Paraguay was great!

The Peace Corps provided the first three months of training in Aregua, Paraguay. The Peace Corps arranged for a regular van and a driver to take us on field trips, so while I was in training they scheduled with the driver to take me back and forth to the sessions. I lived with a homestay family where the Peace Corps had built two ramps in the home and built a stool that I used in the shower. My personal video was shown to my homestay family so they knew all about me before I came. My homestay family was wonderful; they welcomed me to be a part of their family.

Q: How were the attitudes towards you as a volunteer with a disability?

A: Paraguayan society accepted me, but I saw other times that Paraguayans with disabilities were not as accepted. Part of it has to do with my personality; I tend to say hello to people. People didn’t stare at me any more than they do in the United States, but I would say being stared at is part of being a foreigner in another country. I don’t think people stared at me any more because of my disability than the fact that I was a foreigner.

I don’t want to give you the idea that I didn’t encounter anyone at all who wasn’t standoffish towards me because of my disability, because I did. I worked with a woman who had a very hard time seeing a person with a disability as capable as I am. I struggled with that as a volunteer. She told me that she needed to work with me for at least 20 years before she felt that she could ever change her attitude. That attitude could be found in the United States as well, but in general I did not encounter it much in Paraguay. I have also come to know that there are many Paraguayans with disabilities who are not active in the community.

Q: How was it getting around in your wheelchair in a country with less physical infrastructure?

A: There is an infrastructure in Paraguay that is even better than any type of physical infrastructure — there’s an attitude among the people that is extraordinary. This is a true example for me of community. Part of the Paraguayan culture is to be a humanitarian and to be friendly with one another. Yes, there were physical barriers in Paraguay, and yes, I was 100% independent. How did I do it?

I knew what I was getting into in Paraguay to some degree because of my previous international experience studying abroad and interning in Costa Rica. I did need to have flexibility in my definition of independence. Is independence always being able to do something for myself? I had to redefine that. It wasn’t necessarily that I did it, but that I accomplished a goal that I had set forth with assistive technology or by human assistance. To me that is independence as well.

For example, I wanted to go a few times to help another Peace Corps volunteer with her new summer camp project. She lived an hour from the town. To go there I had to take a taxi to the bus terminal, and then I had to find the porters and politely ask if they wouldn’t mind helping me get on the bus. They would lift my wheelchair up; they would lift me up; I’d say “thank you” and they would go on. Then the bus driver would get on the bus. I would say hello and explain I was going to need a hand when I got to the town. If the driver said he would be glad to help, well, then I solved my challenge in terms of how I was going to get off the bus. If the driver wasn’t able to do it, then as soon as passengers got on the bus I would start asking. I had a whole hour on the bus to find someone on the bus to get me off of it. So I always found someone on the bus to lift me off and lift my wheelchair, and as soon as I’d get to plaza there would be a whole bunch of kids there and one of them would help me in terms of pushing me if I needed to get through the dirt to go on to the summer camp. So that’s how I redefined independence; I consider this to be an example of independence.

A person with a disability is not necessarily limited by their disability, but rather by the environment that he or she is in. It may seem a little strange, but I found my transportation options to be more available in Paraguay than they are in the United States. I could use my power wheelchair to purchase daily food supplies and toiletry items from neighborhood stores. I lived in a neighborhood whose roads are put together with rocks like cobblestones, and when it rains, it looks like a creek. My wheelchair managed to go splashing through puddles and bouncing over these rocky roads. Yet when I run out of toothpaste in a suburban town in the United States, the grocery store is a few miles away and not to mention it is accessible only by roads without sidewalks. I also found that taxis in Paraguay were a third of the cost of what they are in the United States, and there were also two taxi stands only a block away from my home.

Q: Were there wheelchair-accessible homes in Paraguay?

A: Paraguay is a developing country, so there wasn’t much money to spend on elaborate architecture. Buildings tended to be a lot simpler — they are not as complex so you don’t usually have many flights of stairs. Most homes in Paraguay are one story and have no steps to enter them at all. Some homes have dirt floors, but in the city most homes had concrete floors. Some homes would possibly have one step up. When I needed to visit a neighbor’s home as a volunteer, I asked a carpenter to build me a ramp and I left it at their house; then I would use it whenever I went to visit. Other families would just help me into their homes.

When deciding on my apartment, I did an assessment of it before I paid my first month's rent to decide if I was going to live there. Happily, I was able to function efficiently there. I lived in a two-story complex; I had a first floor apartment and I happened to move into my apartment right when they were building a new sewage system. I went and helped them lay the cement, and I just gave them suggestions about where to put a little bit more so I would have a ramp.

In my apartment's bathroom, I had a toilet bowl like those in the United States, but the pipes go directly into a deep hole in the ground. I had a roll-in shower. No one built that for me; it was just that way. Most homes had them because the typical way to build a modern Paraguayan bathroom (and even in rural areas people are starting to build modern bathrooms) included cement floors with maybe some tiles, a porcelain toilet, some kind of sink bowl, a spout for a shower and a drain on the floor. Generally there’s nothing to separate these sections, so it’s a roll-in shower.

Q: It has been less than a year since you returned from your two years in the Peace Corps. What opportunities have you had since then?

A: I have worked as a consultant for Justin Dart, a world-renowned disability activist, and helped him with his book, You Have Power, Make the Dream Live, A Revolution of Empowerment. In addition, I volunteered to talk with primary and secondary students about the importance of community service, cultural diversity, disability and career development. I have just started a job as the Project Coordinator of the North Carolina Farmworkers AgrAbility Project in Raleigh. I will work throughout the state to vocationally empower farmers and farm workers with disabilities through an initiative started by the 1990 Farm Bill and supported by the Kate B. Reynolds Ability Program. [Editor's Note: As of 2005, Christa currently holds a position working with youth and transition issues at the Social Security Administration].

Q: What important contributions can people with disabilities make as international volunteers?

A: I believe individuals with disabilities can change the global disability community by:

• Being role models — community workers with disabilities are in a unique position to motivate others to value the contributions of people with disabilities;
• Modeling empowerment by representing the principles of empowerment when taking responsibility for themselves and encouraging others to do the same;
• Opening minds by demonstrating self-confidence and self-initiative — a light bulb of awareness can spark an interest in others to see people with disabilities as community leaders; and
• Being enthusiastic and a positive force in leading others to form a world of peace and solidarity for people with and without disabilities.