Cherry was born in 1944 and contracted polio aged three, which her mother thought came from a fly, giving her a ‘lifelong horror’ of them. She was hospitalised for nine months, though she doesn’t remember it, and wore one calliper on her left leg. Through her teenage years she had a series of operations, including hamstring transplants, bone removal to equalise her leg length and a lumbar sympathectomy, an operation on the nervous system intended to improve circulation.

Whilst her parents were active member of the local British Polio Fellowship Branch, ‘they were just normal about it. They didn’t feel any stigma. They just got on with it really’, she said it must have been hard on her brother, suggesting ‘I hope he didn’t suffer because of the attention I got’.

Cherry doesn’t think she missed out on much, apart from dances as a teenager. She travelled extensively and worked as a teacher, social worker and manager for adoption services and now in retirement she paints watercolours.

As she’s got older, she’s experienced stiffness, pain and tiredness, though she’s not sure if its post-polio syndrome, and uses lots of assistive technologies and at-home helps provided by occupational therapists. She suggested that ‘Well, I think the problem nowadays is that physiotherapists don’t even know what polio is really, so they don’t know how to treat it. Doctors don’t know either, really.’

Jim was born in 1946 and was diagnosed with polio after swimming in the sea on a family holiday aged six. He was ‘totally paralysed from head to foot’ and was put in an iron lung, ‘a pretty ugly big coffin shaped box’, for six months, and a ‘plaster cast from my feet to my shoulders’, which intended to hold his body ‘in a static position so that it didn’t deform’. Due to his father pushing for it, he was moved to Queen Mary’s, where he received the Sister Kenny Method, which involved massages and hot packs. He lived there was four years on a children’s ward, where he had ‘lively kid type pranks’ with the other children.

Jim also had surgery where pins were put inside of his knees to equalise growth and went to Stoke Mandeville aged 15 to learn more skills of independent living where they ‘assessed you as to what you should be able to do and then they just bullied you into doing it’.

After discharge from hospital, he joined a mainstream school where he was the only one in a wheelchair and couldn’t access lessons which were upstairs. During this time he used to break his legs a lot because he ‘would do sort of semi-dangerous things and fall out of the chair’.

He joined a firm of stoke brokers and later worked in advertising and marketing for which he travelled extensively: his company decided ‘if he says he can do it he can do it’, and after he retired, he continued to work in marketing consultancy and has recently received an MBE for his community work. Jim suggested that his disability made his sister ‘a more accommodating and nicer woman’ but doesn’t think it impacted his wife or daughters, declaring that: ‘kids adapt’.

Aged 50, Jim started getting headaches in the morning, which meant he had to go back on a respirator, now for 17 hours a day. He has also experienced a loss in dexterity of his hands and has a lot of pain which must be managed. He has had some at home-helps, adaptations and care provided by the local council, but complained about lack of coordination between different authorities.

Jean was born in 1946 and contracted polio aged 13 months. It took a while for her to be diagnosed, and when her mother asked, ‘well, how long will it take till it gets better?’ You know, [the doctor] just said something like ‘oh my dear, this is it, you know, sort of for life’’.

She was isolated on a rehabilitation ward for months, had a nighttime splint for a period, and has worn a calliper since, which she would take off and hide it from the teacher, suggesting that ‘that’s quite funny that, isn’t it, you know when you think “if I’m not wearing it, I haven’t got a problem“‘. Despite being the only disabled person in her school, she never felt bullied or targeted, and was also a member of what was then the Infantile Paralysis Fellowship, where she enjoyed swimming, though she couldn’t run or dance.

Jean had various surgeries, ‘to be, you know, made whole again’, including ankle-fixing, a lumbar sympathectomy to increase blood supply and leg lengthening surgery. She suggested that ‘I was always told all my life, I was told, that when I was 16, I’m sort of stopped growing, that’s when they would do surgery, and they would, um, and I can’t remember the exact terms they used, but in my head, I thought they were gonna make it right’. She didn’t complete A-levels or go to university until after she had her children because the surgeries took so long, but worked in the civil service for eight years.

Jean’s family were considerate but didn’t fuss over her, ‘I would stumble on the stairs, roll down, and somebody would shout, ‘all right?’, and if I answered, I mean, nobody, they didn’t come running’. Equally, her husband ‘didn’t sort of pander to me’, ‘but he was considerate […] I fall down quite a bit and he would just pick me up’.

When she got callipers as a child, the orthotists were all disabled in some way and they ‘used to listen to me and they used to try to adjust it’, but she finds that nowadays orthotists ‘don’t have the experience’. Jean doesn’t have a post-polio syndrome diagnosis but thinks she may have ‘quite a lot of it’, including pain, which she has become used to, though she is ‘fitter than most of my friends’.

In 1950 when he was two years old, Alan’s parents noticed that he didn’t stand up and hang off the side of the cot one morning. He was diagnosed with polio and was hospitalised on a rehabilitation ward for eight months, during which time he was in an iron lung respirator. Later, doctors attempted to operate on his paralysed arm, but none of the operations were successful.

He received some schooling on the operative ward, then wore a calliper to school, until he decided ‘I will do it without’. His parents were very supportive saying to him ‘Look, you know, you’re different than anyone else. You just might have a bit of a twisted leg and a twisted arm, but people will get they’ll look beyond that, they’ll look at the personality, they’ll look at you the person.’

Alan worked as a cost clerk, bookmaker, general manager, civil servant and government auditor, though he always wished to be a train driver. He ‘managed normally’ for most of his life, until post-polio ‘limited [his] lifestyle’, meaning that he needs a walking stick to balance and prevent falling, and various other at-home aids, provided by the county council. He is an active member of the British Polio Fellowship, including having been a branch chair for many years.

Jacky was born in 1948 and contracted polio aged two and a half, after which she was hospitalised. She said that it ‘must’ve been awful. You wouldn’t do that sort of thing now, would you? Take the child away for six months.’ Even after she was discharged, she had to go back twice a year to see how her leg was doing.

Her family shaped her attitude: she said that ‘I’ve been taught all my life to pick myself up and get going, and that’s from my parents’. Her older brothers were also very supportive, but there was some stigma around her village when she contracted polio, including people not associating with her family and the council fumigating her house.

Jacky wore a calliper in school which led to name calling, and due to her feet being two different sizes she had to wear different sized shoes. She was part of a group which paired people up with ‘their opposites’, allowing odd shoe exchanges. Over time, she adjusted: ‘I knew my limit. I couldn’t wear three-inch heels, you know, but I could wear a shoe and I was still here.’

Recently, she has been experiencing falls and pain in her knee and has found in later life that she is more upset about these problems than she has ever been. She said this is in part because doctors don’t seem to understand or care, or to accept the diagnosis of post-polio syndrome.

Jack contracted polio in 1950, aged 18 months. He remembers crawling in the grass with a plaster on his leg, using a pedal go-chair and going to the local ‘open air, salt water and cold, very cold’ swimming pool to strengthen his leg. He had a doctor who would ‘squeeze my leg or the ankle and say ‘you can do this or do that’’, and who performed a tendon transplant on him when he was eight.

He has always used shoe lifts but ‘flatly refused callipers’ as a child, because he didn’t want ‘this clumpy lump of steel attached to me all the time’, but ‘eventually succumbed to a walking aid’ in 1985 and began using a Knee Ankle Foot Orthosis (KAFO)/ calliper. Jack’s mother was ‘instrumental in pushing [him] forwards’ and let him do things like biking and climbing trees, and whilst he wasn’t allowed to do more manual things in school, he was always picked for football, even if it was last and he was usually in goal.

When he left school, he experienced hiring discrimination but was able to get an office job after six months and worked in sales and advertising, suggesting that ‘you adapt more so than they adapt for you, and that’s always been my, my ethos, you just grow up and live with what you’ve got, yeah, nothing else for it.’ His disability ‘made absolutely no difference to [his wife and daughter] whatsoever, which is really great. They just take me for what I am, good, bad, ugly, whatever.’

Jack was always ‘desperate’ to drive, and found that the car gave him ‘independence, total independence’ and that ‘driving has been a major part in my life and don’t know what I would’ve done without it, to be honest’. He did lots of rally car driving, which is particularly emphasised in the memoir he has written about his experiences, and founded British Motor Sports Association for the Disabled (BMSAD) to promote disabled representation.

After a trial vaccine in 1950, Joyce S contracted polio aged 11 months. She described how ‘the authorities went into a very strict denial’ and public health officials ‘bombarded’ her family with hygiene questions.

After she was diagnosed, the consultant said to her mother, ‘take her home, she’ll never walk’. She wasn’t hospitalised ‘so my parents took on the rehab task’, which included organising physiotherapy, involving ‘literally pulling my legs’. She suggested that her family were ‘not great communicators’, but her brothers were ‘very supportive’ and the experience made them more independent and self-sufficient.

Joyce S had various operations, though she suggested that of a local surgeon in her area ‘there was a suspicion that some of the operations he did were for the sake of experimentation and research’. This included ankle fixing and a ‘relatively experimental’ procedure which inserted staples into her knees at the growth points to equalise them, meaning she has short legs in comparison to her body. In later life, due to extreme back pain she wore an external rib cage and had a spinal manipulation surgery, as well as going to ‘military style’ physiotherapy, which was very rigid and measured.

She went to a small Catholic primary school but didn’t take things very seriously: ‘I was quite laid back about the idea that my education had huge gaps’. She worked various travelling and manual jobs, suggesting ‘I was never going to be a secretary or do sitting down jobs’.

She has worn callipers since childhood and now uses a wheelchair in the house, with her daughter living in and caring for her, especially since she has lost mobility due to post-polio syndrome.

Alan H was born in 1950 and contracted polio aged 11 months. He said that his ‘development, insofar as because walking wasn’t an option, was delayed, so I crawled much longer than a child normally would. I don’t think anything else was sort of held up’. Aged five he was ‘strapped on my back‘ for six months to remove the scoliosis and briefly went to a Special ‘Open Air’ School, before being transferred to a mainstream school aged seven.

He worked in clerical jobs and as a college lecturer and has worn a full-length calliper on his right leg for his whole life. He said that his sisters both saw him as ‘a bit of a hero’, and that his daughters have never ‘seen me as anything other than dad’.

Alan described how ‘it all started going pear shaped when I was in the 50s, and things just didn’t work so well’, linked to the emergence of post-polio syndrome. He said that it was described to him as ‘you’re a 50-year-old bloke in a 70-year-olds body, that’s what polio’s done to you’. Due to his use of crutches, his shoulders increasingly began to ‘play up’, meaning that he now uses a wheelchair. The older he has become, the less he tries to cover up the impacts of polio.

Meena was born in 1951 in Kenya and contracted polio aged nine months. She had a high fever then was given an injection, after which she experienced paralysis. Once her family knew it was polio, which was seen to be very contagious, she was locked in a small room in quarantine. She didn’t walk until she was four, and was just carried from place to place, until her grandmother ‘put me in the room, lock me, and make me walk around and round the table, that’s how I learned’.

She didn’t wear shoes until primary school but then started wearing canvas shoes of two different sizes, and a calliper as she grew older. When her brother cycled her to school ‘we had to remove the, the calliper, it was not of this modern style. We had to remove the calliper, hang it on the cycle, and then we go home’. However, she suggested that as a child, ‘‘I was never discriminated because I was disabled.’

Before she went to a modern hospital she went to a herbal doctor who treated her with oil massages, heat and then she was sent to India: ‘to be treated for my polio leg’. She completed her high school and university in India, and wore a calliper until then, which had a hinge meaning that she could bend her leg, though after this she only wore raised insoles.

She was ‘pampered a lot’ as a child but her importance in the household changed after she returned to Kenya and her brother had had children. Back in Kenya she got a job at a secondary school and later became the head teacher. She didn’t get married ‘because two disabled people cannot look after each other, you know’, and does not have children.

Since moving to Britain to live with her brother, she uses a Zimmer frame and mobility scooter, has sought some support through the British Polio Fellowship and has had an operation on her ‘good leg’ which was ‘going backwards’. Meena described how she is now experiencing post-polio syndrome in ‘every part of the body’ but has had some issues with the provision of at home adaptations by the local council. She suggested that ‘at this stage of life when my life has become very difficult it hurts me. Otherwise, it never hurt me when I was young because I took life as it comes’.

Moz contracted polio aged 13 months in 1953 whilst already in hospital for a bad scald. He remembers ‘little isolated pictures’ of rehabilitation, suggesting he blocked out such memories ‘possibly because they were painful, but more likely because they were boring’. He described ‘my first day going home, and I was propped up against a garden roller And I was sitting up, and I was absolutely joyful. I was, I got my mouth open, and it was just, God, this is the open air. It’s wonderful.’

Moz had a ‘plaster brace fitted to my leg, which was meant to correct the angle at the bottom’. He described how ‘I had been sold the idea that wearing this big plaster in bed every night was going to make me better […] and I lived this dream that one day I would be better, like the other kids. And then it slowly dawned on me I wasn’t going to get better. This was a forever sort of trick.’ He wore a calliper until he was ten when he ‘got vain’ and didn’t use any other technology until he began using an orthotic boot aged 50, though he now has ‘noticeable scoliosis’ due to the impact of polio on his gait.

He grew up in lodgings with his dad and had a lot of freedom, cycling long distances to see his friends. He suggested that ‘I didn’t know what a normal childhood would’ve been like’ and that his older half-brothers were a bit jealous that ‘I was getting all the attention’. Of school, he suggested ‘I didn’t really experience bullying […] kids were actually sympathetic, outwardly anyway’: he may have been picked last for football ‘but I was involved’.

Moz worked in management until he was 64, where he ‘probably exceeded my expectations’, ‘I’ve made a good fist of it […] I haven’t let polio hold me back’. He described how for most of his life ‘I’ve thought of myself as normal as I can be, and I’ve wanted to be as normal as I can be’.

Since 2023, Moz has had a radio show where he often discusses topics relevant to polio and does lots of writing and awareness raising around polio. He is experiencing post-polio syndrome, suggesting that ‘it’s progressive, and it starts off quite slowly, but it accelerates’ and that people with the condition should not ‘work yourself to exhaustion, conserve to preserve’.

Nigel was born in Kenya in 1952, where he lived until he was 12, with his mother working as a nurse and his father working for the colonial government. He hadn’t had the vaccination and contracted polio in hospital aged 18 months, after which he was temporarily sent to Nuffield in Oxford for treatment.

He ‘was very lucky that the school I went to in Kenya […] was very close to a physiotherapist from South Africa who gave me treatment on a very regular basis’, which included heat and electric shock treatment on his right leg. Nigel didn’t use assistive technologies as a child: they tried raising his shoes ‘but I didn’t like it and just carried on normally’. He suggested that ‘I was very lucky since I could run around, didn’t need any aids, I recovered pretty well. I was lucky’. His mother was ‘get on with it, she was great, really resilient’, and his sister was ‘proud of everything I did’.

At University Nigel studied life sciences and did lots of research expeditions involving physical activities, ‘polio didn’t get in the way, used to fall down a bit but it wasn’t an issue’, though he wasn’t able to fulfil his goals of joining the army, climbing mountains or doing scuba diving. He has been back to Kenya 40 times and is ‘very proud of my Kenyan roots’.

Nigel referred to his ‘wonky leg, what I call having badly behaved legs’, and described having had ‘five major falls’ due to his legs collapsing and giving way, receiving hydrotherapy and physiotherapy as ‘part of the repair’. He asserted that ‘the great lesson is don’t fall over, don’t break your legs. Big lesson’.

For him, the late effects of polio have included increasing leg weakness, impacts to his lungs and memory loss, meaning that ‘my dear dear wife is having to do more for me and carry things and pick up the mess when I fall over’. He started using (leopard print) crutches in 2019, suggesting ‘the moment you become reliant on them, you then begin to lose your normal gait’. Additionally, he recently got a blue badge, which he didn’t get earlier because ‘I hadn’t really thought of myself as disabled’.

When she was six years old, Rosalinda contracted polio, which she attributes to the vaccine, suggesting that ‘one of the batches was faulty so it didn’t take’. Her parents denied this: ‘It was almost as if I was sort of something that was shameful and to be hidden away and certainly not made a fuss of’.

Rosalinda described how ‘it only gradually became obvious that my right leg had been particularly affected, and I had an operation when I was aged eight’. This released contracted tendons, but she wasn’t given crutches afterwards so ‘I was masking it and so sort of staggering around and kind of lagging behind so that people wouldn’t be watching when I was walking and having to hold on to things.’ Later, aged 16, she had a series of serial operations on ‘tendons and some ones with bony deformities as well’ which was ‘just really gruelling’.

She only began using assistive technologies aged 10. This included a back brace and ‘the collar of various designs, some more intrusive than others, some really horrible leather and metal ones’, suggesting that she cannot ‘sit upright without it and I tend to fold forward at the waist’. Rosalinda started using a wheelchair in her 30s and uses crutches to get in and out of her house. Her callipers are ‘seven kilos, so you’re lugging that around with you’, and when she sent her spare pair for repairs around a decade ago, they were misplaced.

Her experience of school was very disrupted and ‘I did get bullied, and not just by the kids, by the teachers as well’. Her brother and sister also ‘don’t really talk much about it’. She works in museums and conservation and found it very difficult getting accepted in the workplace ‘if you were a disabled woman, you just had to be better.’

Rosalinda does lots of open water swimming, including across the channel and Loch Ness and has represented Britain at two paralympic games, swimming using just her arms. She has also travelled extensively, where she makes sure that ‘I’m not going to ask for any help from anyone’.

Whilst her GP ‘says he doesn’t believe in post-polio syndrome, he says it’s just aging’, she suggested ‘I think sort of worsening symptoms is a bit of an indication’. However, she hasn’t applied for any support or grants, ‘because as I say, I’m independent, I don’t need any of that’.

Sunita had a fever aged 15 months and was given an injection, but the next morning she ‘couldn’t walk, that’s what I’ve been told, my legs kept giving way’. Her parents took her to many places, including India, for ‘herbal medications and massages’, and to many temples, suggesting ‘I think my mother sort of got told that, you know, if you keep on doing this, she’s gonna get alright, she’s gonna be alright, she’s gonna be able to walk properly’.

Her father died when she was 5, and after this ‘life became very difficult […] there was no other support’. In Kenya, they made her braces and a raised shoe but ‘it used to be very, very heavy and very ugly’ so she refused to wear it and ‘there was no, no physio or no operations, anything like that’. Eventually she learned to walk, which she used to do ‘by holding my knee’.

Sunita moved to Britain when she was 16, and whilst her brother didn’t want her to work she ‘sneakily got a job and we told him afterwards’ and after university she worked in a hospital doing research, until she had a bad fall. Because her mum didn’t speak English ‘she became more dependent on us to do things outside for her’.

Sunita described how ‘in our culture, very, very difficult for somebody with disability to find somebody who’s going to marry you’, suggesting that ‘in the Hindu culture, a disability is something very taboo’. She met her husband ‘herself’, rather than through an arrangement and whilst they don’t have any children, she has cared for her father-in-law, her mother and her sister and niece’s babies. Her and her husband also do lots of work with their local ‘polio group’ because other members are getting older.

She has been diagnosed with post-polio syndrome in the past few years, which involves weakness in her left leg and arm, pain, fatigue and cold. Sunita has fallen many times recently and finds that she can’t get up off the floor anymore ‘because the muscles have got weaker and I have a metal shoulder in there and the calliper leg as well’. Now, she uses a walking stick, calliper, including inside the house, and a wheelchair because she doesn’t want to ‘risk having another fall’. She suggested that ‘I think that’s another thing with polio people, a lot of us try to cover up’, though ‘now I couldn’t care less’.

Jerry was born in 1955 and contracted polio aged 18 months, due to a delay in getting his vaccination, describing a childhood photograph (below) which his father ‘always said was the day he thinks I caught it’. He doesn’t ‘remember any special treatments’ from his family whilst growing up, which was ‘quite good actually’.

His brothers told him that ‘there was some quarantine involved’ and that he was in an iron lung, but he has ‘no early childhood memories. I used to have some weird sort of nightmares occasionally, but nothing. I think it’s probably just trauma from that time’, suggesting that ‘they were worried I was going to die and stuff like this’. Physiotherapy at hospital, where he ‘got very used to my own company’, included ‘little shape pieces of felt that I had to try and get between my toes’.

Jerry used to be taken to school in ‘push chair thing’ and refused a wheelchair aged six, suggesting ‘65 years it was to get me, it took me to get into a wheelchair, so I had to learn to ride a bike’. He wore callipers until he had surgeries to lengthen his tendons and ‘stabilise my left ankle’, which ‘had a huge impact for me, because I was able to walk better’. Whilst this operation was ‘a bit more brutal’, it was also the ‘best thing that ever happened’.

Jerry suggested that after this ‘I got on with my life for the next 40 years’, working as a solicitor and doing some workplace activism around disability, ‘and then post-polio stuff started to kick in’. He stated that ‘I’ve probably achieved more with my life because I’ve had polio and I’ve got a great family […] ‘I’m very comfortable with who I am’.

Jerry started using a walking stick in his fifties and now wears built up shoes and uses a lightweight fold-up power chair. He has recently had extensive surgery on his shoulders which he thinks is ‘to do with all the falls I’ve had over the years’ and been diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, which explained to him as ‘I’ve got so much gas in the tank, and it was up to me how I used it’.

Born on an RAF base in Britain in 1959, David J soon after moved to Nairobi with his family, where his father was in the air force. Fourteen hours after his arrival, he had been taken to the market by Moses, who worked in their house, when a doctor at the market noticed that his ‘my head could move very easily and was wobbling’ and said ‘you need to take that baby to a European hospital’. He described how ‘the virus was active up to the base of my lungs’, and how whilst ‘we didn’t leave Nairobi for 18 months, I never went back to the house’, spending this time in an iron lung, from which he has a ‘ridiculous enclosed space memory’.

Back in Britain, David J had physiotherapy and initially wore callipers, which he got rid of, suggesting that ‘I don’t know whether its normal in polio sufferers but I’m not great at accepting what the situation is’. He went to a ‘slightly specialist school’ for a while, but suggested that ‘I didn’t fit in the disabled environment’.

He described how ‘going through school was not an issue to me whatsoever’ because ‘I’m not backwards in coming forward’ and he worked lots of manual jobs before working in sales and procurement. He now uses a walker, stick, electric scooter and wheelchair, but didn’t use these when he was working ‘because it stands out like a sore thumb’. David J drives a Motability van and has some at home adaptations but suggested ‘I still don’t like to be seen in a wheelchair’.

Around ten years ago, he began experiencing post-polio syndrome, with pain that is systemic, even in parts of his body not impacted by polio. He stated that ‘they can’t give you a tablet to make polio symptoms or PPS get better’, and that you’d think ‘have thought there’d be somebody that would specialise in it’ in the UK.

Dipta moved from India with her parents when she was a few months old in 1961 and soon after contracted polio in London, where ‘there was just quite a lot of it around’. She ‘had it right up to the neck’ and spent ‘months and months in an iron lung’, also receiving hydrotherapy and physiotherapy. In terms of surgeries, she suggested that ‘I didn’t really know what they were doing’, but this included fixing her ankle, which is ‘starting to go now’ but has ‘done half a century’.

Her father died when she was young, and she ‘pulled ranks’ and was very close with her siblings: ‘its funny, they’re quite protective now, but as kids, they weren’t, they would fight with me, I never got left out of fights or anything like that’. She went to a grammar school for physically disabled girls, which had lots of specialised facilities.

Dipta has an adapted Motability car which allows her to drive using hand controls. She has always had callipers and sticks and suggested that she was much more mobile 30 years ago and carried a pregnancy to full term. She has been diagnosed with ‘some’ post-polio syndrome but is ‘always future proofing’. Despite some peoples’ misconceptions she made it clear that when her son was a child, ‘he was definitely not my carer, I was his carer’.

Despite issues with hiring discrimination in the late 1970s, Dipta works as a quality advisor and auditor. She suggested that her contribution to disability activism was ‘just going out there and showing people that I’m a regular person like them.’ Reflecting on her life, she said ‘I suspect my own worst enemy was me, in that it was like, I’ll show them I can do this, whereas, what’s wrong with showing someone you can’t do it? You need a bit of help’.

David A’s interview was conducted in Kiswahili with a translator.

David A contracted polio when he was four years old, ‘when I was starting to walk’. He didn’t go to hospital, due to lack of knowledge around clinics and vaccination. After this, his family believed there was no need to take him to school, which was seen as a waste of money, due to the belief that people with disabilities ‘couldn’t do anything’.

When he was 17, a family friend suggested that he go for leatherwork training, which was funded by the government who opened a business for him. He described how ‘that is now when they even started to accept me, that now I had started to, to earn money’. When he first went for training ‘I didn’t even know myself’, he hated it and went he ‘wasn’t even fit to be alive’, but then ‘I found others who were in a worse state than I was. I encouraged myself and felt that, at least, I was doing something’.

David A had a leatherworking business where he made school shoes and official shoes, helped by a Rural Enterprise Loan from the government. However, his shop got robbed and he went into debt having to restart. For the last 19 years he has worked fabricating shoes to be used in assistive technologies but finds this work precarious. He wanted to be a doctor but ‘given what happened, I will just take any job, this one that I got, but it was not my choice’. When he grew up, he didn’t ‘want revenge’ for his parents not educating him, but rather just gave them money.

He also began to accept himself after getting married ‘I realised that back then I used to hate being disabled, but now I let go of that’. Over the next eight years he had four children, two girls and two boys. Things are challenging now because he lives alone, ‘because family is not at home. Now all the children have grown up, and all have finished their education. So, I don’t have a younger one that I could stay with’, so he must pay someone to do chores like drawing water for him.

Before he got callipers, aged either 11 or 17, he crawled, before being provided with the technologies at a local Association for the Physically Disabled branch by ‘wazungu’ [meaning white] sponsors. After he got this, he could walk very well, though one occasion they broke, which caused pain before they got fixed. He also uses crutches but stated that he has no issue with using those.

Currently, David A serves as a community promoter where he lives, visiting the houses, and when he finds someone who has hidden a child with disabilities, he suggests that ‘it is good for the child to get some fresh air’, thereby attempting to prevent the isolation and seclusion which happened to him in his childhood.

Joyce was born in Tanzania in 1967, to a Kenyan father and Ethiopian mother, where she loved to be near the river, make fires and hunt and ‘was not afraid of anything’. She contracted polio aged five, and four years later when her parents split up and her family had to flee Tanzania because of the war, she was left behind because she couldn’t walk.

She lived in a camp for Kenyans before being transferred to Dagoretti Children’s Home, which specialised in children with disabilities. There she received an orthopaedic operation on her leg to straighten it, which involved inserting a metal device. She then started wearing callipers, though she said that she ‘had high hopes now they have taken me to the hospital I’ll walk with my leg without using any device’.

Joyce was not allowed to go to school in Tanzania due to taboo around children with disabilities but enjoyed education when she started school as ‘a big girl’ in Kenya. She has worked various odd jobs, and when she started doing acting she faced discrimination, including a director saying ‘Joyce, you know, I give you scripts through pity. I pity you’. Her four children don’t recognise that she has a disability, encouraging her by saying ‘hey, mum, you are strong. Hey, you are not that disabled. You can do it.’ She does various forms of activism through her church, creating disability awareness and rescuing children from unsafe situations.

Due to high costs, she cannot afford to access medical appointments or physiotherapy, and her current callipers, which are made by the Association of the Physically Disabled of Kenya, cost around 138,000 Kenyan Shillings (~£800). She also described issues of access, including the lack of pavements and ramps which are too steep.

Grace was born in 1972, and ‘got polio when I was two years. I was just playing there with her, like another kid, then I got fever’. She had four older siblings so her mother took her to a Dagoretti Children’s Home where they cared for her, an experience which was challenging but also ‘sweet’ because there were others with disabilities.

When Grace was 12, she had corrective surgery on her leg to help it straighten, which was ‘hard but I managed’. She had fixed callipers as a child but now has hinged ones and uses crutches, though she described how ‘a boy with a trolley. came and hit me: mine got broke’, so now she uses some which were given to her by a friend.

Things got harder when she came back to the village aged 16 where ‘life was tough’. She used to fight with her siblings over water they’d collected but the rest of the time ‘they loved me as their sister’. She described how ‘it makes your heart not feel happy’ when she wasn’t included in things like sport, and how in her village she was ‘trying to live like them, because I want to be like them. I am a I am a African mama, so I have to do the way the Africans do’.

She had to walk a long way to get to school and when her callipers broke, she had to be carried or stay at home ‘like, three weeks, four weeks, without education, till I get another calliper, I can be back to school’, an issue of access which she continues to face to this day.

Grace worked in a factory for a time but now owns her own business and works as a street vendor, where she faces some harassment from city officials, though she has done extensive activism against this and is a leader in her community. She also does community work with the volunteers educating people about polio, ‘telling them I’m one of the victims of the polio’, and has appeared in a local television programme aiming to encourage polio vaccination. She described many barriers due to disability but suggested that ‘all in all, you have to accept it and continue going’.

Hamila contracted polio aged four but didn’t know that that was what her condition was until she was around 12, and the Flying Doctors came around. She said that this was ‘sad for me, to know, if it were not for me, not to get the polio shot, I could be, like, the other normal children’. As a young child she was taken to a health centre for ‘correction’ but her father felt it was too far and took her home, saying ‘I would wish you to just stay with this condition of limping rather than losing your leg.’

She grew up in very a remote area, alongside pastoral communities like the Maasai suggesting that ‘the culture and norms of Maasai, raising a child with disability, it was like a curse, and a bad omen’. This meant other children with disabilities did not go to school, but her parents ‘took that step and took me to school, despite all the challenges’. There, the attitude of other children was very bad ‘with my limping leg they used to call me hyena’.

She had issues with finding employment due to hiring discrimination, then worked for an NGO as a data collection, before having an accident which impacted her sight and hearing. Since that, she has formed a community-based organisation for women and girls with disability ‘because they are being hidden, they are being denied their rights’. Hamila suggested that she has been an activist ‘ever since I understood about my right’.

She also vied for political positions to ‘bring in the voice of women with disability in the parliament’, but doesn’t have the financial resources despite having ‘vision and good manifesto to work for the community’.

Normally, she uses one crutch, ‘but it becomes very painful and very stiffening sometimes’, meaning she has to use two. Rain and flooding mean that sometimes she slips and the crutches break, meaning that she becomes dependent on others. Whilst Hamila has many symptoms of post polio syndrome, including pain, weakness and fatigue, she suggested that prior to the interview, she ‘never even thought’ they could be related to polio.

Zipporah found out she had polio aged seven, despite contracting it much earlier: ‘I did not grow like other people, so that’s why they recognise I had a problem’. Her mother was uneducated ‘so they didn’t bother to take us for injections’ and she grew up thinking that she was ‘bewitched’. Her mother used to complain ‘why can’t I be like, like other children, I’m too expensive’, and whilst her father was more supportive, because he was ‘a little bit educated’ he worked in the city which was far away.

When she was 10 she had a metal bar put in to straighten the leg, which was very painful, after which ‘everything became okay, I was now able to go to school’, though this was at 11 years old. Before she had the operation or an assistive device ‘I was just crawling, you know, you just crawling, it was not easy’. At school there was a lot of stigma and bad attitudes from other children which impacted her engagement and meant ‘I started catching up at 15 years’. Her mother prioritised the education of her non-disabled siblings so she stopped her education after secondary school.

She still has pain in her leg ‘I think the metal, the inserted, it attracts a lot of cold’, and sometimes ‘it kind of refuse to walk’. This is particularly difficult now because one of her sons has moved out and the other is in boarding school, so she needs someone in the house to help with cooking and washing and finds living alone ‘very challenging’.

Despite hiring discrimination, Zipporah worked for organisations which help HIV+ people and Key Population until USAID cuts, and now does locum work training staff around disability rights. She also has her own organisation which does work around women’s health and gender based violence and described herself as ‘a human rights defender’ who aims to prove that ‘there is life after disability and you can work like another person’.

She described how her children ‘love what I do, because me, I don’t fear, I advocate without fear, and they like it. They say that we have a strong mother, who can talk on behalf of others.’ She said that she likes Mandamano (meaning public protest), and calls for others to protest without fear.

Her current crutch is provided by Hope Mobility and whilst she used to use a wheelchair, her condition has improved thanks to physiotherapy. She suggested that when she was a child, people, including her village chief, thought she would die but ‘I’ve managed to live and I’m going to live for more because I’m doing something. I’m not idle’ and that ‘they’ll wait, they’ll wait. And I’m becoming strong and strong. and I’m going far.’

Magdelene contracted polio aged four and was taken to hospital where her mother ‘realised my, my condition was deteriorated […] because the following morning, she came to visit me, and I couldn’t sit on my own’. She had callipers for both legs but used to take them off and crawl a lot because ‘yeah, they were heavy, and I was not used, yeah, because remember, I was walking’ but suggested that when she went to a Special School aged five ‘I realised it was good for me’.

There, Italian doctors conducted surgery on her right leg because ‘I had a tendon that was very stiff so I couldn’t stretch my leg straight’. She only wore one calliper after the surgery: ‘I improved, my disability improved through the surgeries and the physiotherapy, sessions’, and had an additional surgery aged 18 on her left leg because the foot was ‘cramped’. Her current calliper and crutch, which she has used since acquiring an injury, are provided by the National Council of Persons with Disabilities.

After school, Magdelene trained in dressmaking because her father didn’t want her to be unemployed: ‘there are lots of challenges, you know, in unemployment, you can’t move around‘. She did handicrafts like beadwork and envelope making and sold some of her products on the street, though she ‘really wanted to be a secretary’ so did extra training until there was a receptionist vacancy at her current workplace.

Her dream is to retrain as a counsellor for parents of children with disabilities and she wishes the government would support people with disabilities of all ages who want to go back to school because ‘now my salary is not enough for me to go back to school and for my children’.

She is a single mother of four children who ‘really love me and they support me so much’, but suggested that ‘some people, some people in the society, they see if you are a disabled person, you don’t need to get married, you don’t need to give birth’, and that people asked her husband, ‘why did you choose a lady with disability?‘

In her childhood, it was difficult going into public because ‘people were looking at me because at that time, there was no awareness of disability’, but that since President Kibaki of Kenya was sworn into office in a wheelchair (due to a road traffic accident), ‘they could now realise that anybody can get disability’.

Jane was born in 1982 and contracted polio before she could walk, which impacted both legs, to different extents. ‘At first they [her parents] thought it was a kind of bewitching’ and took her to churches to try to cure her, but then when she went to a Special School (between Grade 1 and 5), she learned it was polio. There, they ‘showed us different skills and also how to survive with other normal people’.

Her upbringing was challenging but ‘sometimes I got help from my parents, that’s why I didn’t suffer too much’. Her family ‘took it as normal’ and her and her twin brother ‘used to fight a lot, like normal children’. Her parents, who were farmers, tried to teach her to walk, made her a stick out of a baby tree, and she used to walk bracing her leg, though she now uses a walking stick she bought from the supermarket.

In Grade 5, she moved to a mainstream school and underwent an ankle fixing operation which made a ‘big difference’, and in Grade 12 she had an operation ‘to rectify the bones’. She found this school ‘quite challenging’ because there were learners who ‘did not understand my situation’ and equally found college difficult due to being the only disabled person there and the negative attitudes of others.

Jane has three children who ‘really appreciate me’ and has worked as a teacher for 10 years, and suggested that ‘being a sympathy seeker, it will put you in a point that nobody wants to see you’. She finds it easy to deal with stigma: ‘you don’t care about people because they don’t care about you’.

She has a positive view of peoples’ attitudes towards disability, suggesting that they are improving and that people are increasingly embracing disabled people. Jane does advocacy on a personal level, ‘trying to show them we can do, and being an example, I try to do. So, from there, people learn’. Jane also argued for the importance of speaking up for yourself in medical settings: ‘if you can’t, you suffer’.

Seline was born in 1989 and contracted polio aged seven, after her mother refused vaccination for religious reasons. She described how her legs went numb and she could only crawl: ‘it is hard to be doing things for yourself, and then all of a sudden, you can’t move around’. She spent a year in hospital receiving painful physiotherapy, after which ‘everyone gave up on me’.

Then, Seline stayed at home for a long time, where she felt very isolated and excluded, only coming to understand her diagnosis when she went back to school aged 14. Before this she thought it was a curse, which impacted her mentally.

She used callipers until she was 17, but felt they were hurting more than helping and instead has used a crutch ever since. Whilst she is in constant pain from her leg, she has become used to it over time, suggesting she would rather experience this ‘current pain‘ than that caused by callipers

She had her three children young and worked as a nanny and small business owner. Now, Seline is involved in activism because ‘I wouldn’t want to see any other woman or girl going through what I went through’, suggesting that ‘it would’ve been nice if someone had fought for me, then maybe my life would’ve been different’. She gets frustrated by the lack of implementation of disability legislation and lack of actual considered access.

Seline has faced a lot of stigma, especially from doctors around maternal health, suggesting that ‘it’s just that sometimes I forget that, you know, I am a person with disability until someone reminds me’. Seline stated that ‘now I am proud to be disabled, I am proud to be different from others’.

Abraham contracted polio aged three, after which he was taken to the clinic, ‘maybe for therapy’, though he doesn’t remember specifically. Of his parents he said ‘let me say that… without them, I could not be where I am, because they supported me’. However, he suggested that school ‘was very difficult for me’, due to the attitudes of other children.

He described how ‘first, I was given the shoe, the raised one, because I was having, how do you call it, discrepancy‘. He has a calliper which was provided through the industry that his father worked in, which helped with his mobility; prior to this he was bracing his leg. When he wears it, ‘I can lift something there, but before, I have to struggle for me to carry something’, though it limits the speed he can move at.

Abraham is married with three children and works as a welder, fabricating callipers, though he described issues with hiring discrimination, ‘when somebody sees you, he doesn’t see the experience he sees the disability first’. He expressed that ‘employment is the big issue because without employment, you cannot get the food put on the table’.

He described the power of community with other people with disabilities: ‘I thought I’m the only one with disability. But with time, I interacted with these people […]  yeah, so when you see that, at least you see that you are not alone’. Abraham also stated that ‘it’s not easy, living with disability’, but equally that ‘when you have disability, doesn’t mean that you cannot do anything’.

Born in Western Kenya in 1999, Katila spent most of his life believing that his disability, paralysis of the left leg, was caused by a ‘cultural issue’ to do with him rejecting a name he was given. Elders in his village suggested that ‘if they change my name, I can be maybe become normal and maybe the disease will go away’. He doesn’t use any assistive technologies but says that he has issues with walking long distances and sometimes experiences fatigue and pain.

It wasn’t until he came to the University of Nairobi in 2021 and was applying for a disabled persons card that the doctor diagnosed him with polio using various medical tests and measurements. At university he also started becoming involved in student activism around disability, which gave him leadership experience and training in representing people. Now he works as a teacher, though he hopes to do his masters next year due to the ‘hectic’ nature of the teaching environment.

Katila suggested that you ‘can forget that you are disabled’ until people stare, suggesting that the biggest barrier to people with disabilities is social isolation, hiring discrimination, and lack of knowledge around disability.