The 6th annual International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference this coming weekend has an impressive roster of experts speaking on disability issues, and it's free and open to anyone who wants to virtually attend on the Second Life island known as Virtual Ability: Location info/direct teleport here.
As longtime SLers know, Virtual Ability is a RL non-profit using Second Life as a social platform for the disabled, and the brainchild of the amazing Ms. Alice "Gentle Heron" Krueger, who was featured in the recent Atlantic Monthly profile of Second Life:
Alice was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 50. By then she could barely walk. Her neighborhood association in Colorado prohibited her from building a ramp at the front of her house, so it was difficult for her to go anywhere. Her three children were 11, 13, and 15. She didn’t get to see her younger son’s high-school graduation, or his college campus. She started suffering intense pain in her lower back and eventually had to have surgery to repair spinal vertebrae that had fused together, then ended up getting multidrug-resistant staph from her time in the hospital. Her pain persisted, and she was diagnosed with a misalignment caused by the surgery itself, during which she had been suspended “like a rotisserie chicken” above the operating table. At the age of 57, Alice found herself housebound and unemployed, often in excruciating pain, largely cared for by her daughter. “I was looking at my four walls,” she told me, “and wondering if there could be more.”
That’s when she found Second Life. She created an avatar named Gentle Heron, and loved seeking out waterslides—excited by the sheer thrill of doing what her body could not. As she kept exploring, she started inviting people she’d met online in disability chat rooms to join her. But that also meant she started to feel responsible for their experience, and eventually she founded a “cross-disability virtual community” in Second Life, now known as Virtual Ability, a group that occupies an archipelago of virtual islands and welcomes people with a wide range of disabilities—everything from Down syndrome to PTSD to manic depression. What unites its members, Alice told me, is their sense of not being fully included in the world.
"I am rather of two minds about [the article's] message," Gentle answers when I ask, "and from the way it read, so was the author. In terms of impact on Virtual Ability Island, we've gained some members who say they learned of our existence by reading it, so that's all for the good." Most definitely. Once again, here's the teleport link.
Gentle Heron profile pic by Slatan Dryke
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