Friday, March 29

“My mother said to me, ‘Do you have a brain? So use it’»


Josep Maria Alana. / EVA PAREY

Professor. Josep Maria Alaña was the first achondroplastic patient to win an opposition to teach

Antonio Paniagua

It was not easy to get used to having her clothes made to measure because the ones bought in stores were always too big for her. It bothered him that he couldn’t ring the doorbell because her fingers never reached. However, it can be said that Josep Maria Alaña, who was born with achondroplasia, has had a good life, something that he owes much to his parents, who never taught him to feel sorry for him.

When he graduated in Biology, he was aware that it was very difficult for him to dedicate himself to research. At 127 centimeters tall, all the instruments and furniture of a laboratory were out of his reach. He couldn’t get by with flasks or condensers, but he could talk and, consequently, teach.

He appeared at the age of 22 in an institute in Gavà (Barcelona) willing to teach without complexes and gain the trust of the students. He was the first teacher with dwarfism in Spain, a circumstance that did not frighten him, despite the fact that he could only write on the lower part of the blackboard. Although he could wield a brilliant record and was number one in his promotion, a member of the court doubted whether he could be awarded a place to a dwarf.

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Alaña got ahead thanks to the perseverance of his mother, who one day, being a self-conscious child, told him: «Let’s see, do you have legs? Yes. Do you have arms? Yes. Do you have eyes? Yes. Do you have ears? If you talk? Yes. Do you have a brain? Yes. Then use it».

THE PHRASES:

  • Acceptance.
    «A student painted ‘dwarf bastard’, but he did it because I punished the class, not because of who he was»

  • Image.
    He avoided looking at himself in the mirror: “You see yourself reflected in it and you say, hell, I’m that one”

After winning the civil service position, his left-wing militancy led him to choose to work, at the end of the eighties, in the neighborhood of Can Tunis, in Montjuïc, a marginalized area populated by uprooted gypsies, in order to teach. . Later, he opted for the Jaume Balmes Institute, which with the educational reform had no choice but to accept students that until recently he would have rejected. «The tragedy of the Spanish and Catalan educational systems is that they have large gauges, that know how to put marks with decimals, but ignore what evaluation means, so I wonder if we are teaching to memorize or to learn», he affirms.

Vocational training

Over time Alaña became a pedagogue and was even in charge of promoting the first major reform of Vocational Training sponsored by the Generalitat of Catalonia. His existence, however, was not a bed of roses. He has had to drink some bitter pills, like when he had to look in the mirror. “You look at him and say, hell, I’m that one,” says Alaña, who has published the book ‘Profe i nan’ in Catalan, which in Spanish means “teacher and dwarf”, at the Octaedro publishing house, which will shortly will release the Spanish version.

Work success has smiled on him: teacher, pedagogue, educational manager… However, it has been hard to get rid of the wounds. He has had two children and when they were teenagers, he took one of them to a psychologist. «They told me that the boy had nothing, but that he would be fine if I went to therapy. I still go a few times.”

Women

His students have always treated him with respect and he has never felt rejected, even though he once saw the insult “dwarf bastard” painted on the walls of the institute, but he assumes that the insult was not so much because of his disability as because of his condition. head of studies. “They told me because I had punished them, not because of who he was.”

It was in college that he first came into contact with women. He had met few, because his friends, when Sunday came, went out to flirt and he stayed home. He thought no one would fall in love with him, but he has been married twice and now has four grandchildren. Somehow, politics redeemed him. He militated in Bandera Roja and later in the PSUC, groups in which he was one more. «He was different but he was included in a diverse group doing something in common. They accepted me as I was, they didn’t ask me. In Switzerland he met Santiago Carillo, Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria, and even he was arrested. «They confused me with a guy who was also a dwarf and who was being searched for and captured, Ángel Rozas, founder of the Workers’ Commissions in Barcelona».

survival tactics

If he did not suffer too many snares, it was because he managed to avoid being shipwrecked. As a kid he chose the company of thugs, knowing that a nerd dwarf didn’t last even ten days. «I decided to leave two subjects for September».

It hurts him that Vox and PP refuse to revise the Constitution to eliminate the word “diminished”, and it revolts him that dwarfs are circus meat and bullfighting shows, or hired as ‘strippers’ at bachelorette parties. “These are unacceptable things, an indecent exploitation that violates human rights. Over the years, he boldly claims the “pride of the crippled”, the fact of being different. “At first they used the word ‘mongolian’, then ‘subnormal’, then ‘disabled’, later ‘disabled’ and now ‘people with functional diversity’. But just as sexual diversity has been accepted, our difference must be accepted »., He concludes.


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