Don't let disability dictate your year abroad

If you were given the word "wheelchair" in a word association game, you probably wouldn't respond with "year abroad" or "mountains".

Nevertheless, as an Aston Villa fan living in Yorkshire, I've never made life easy for myself and not taking the obvious path hasn't been limited to my choice of football team.

When weighing up my university options, I was determined not to let my disability dictate my choice. Deciding that a flat, wheelchair-friendly campus university would make things far too straightforward, I plumped for Durham, a paradise of cobbles, stairs and hills.

Despite the obvious logistical challenges, my course and the town are both great and it's been a fantastic experience so far.

With this in mind, I decided on a similarly open-minded approach when organising my year abroad.

Modern languages is one of the very few courses in which spending time abroad is compulsory, so I knew what I was letting myself in for when I applied to study German and Italian.

Finding your way in an unfamiliar land can be tricky enough without adding ramps, lifts and accessible rooms into the mix.

Conscious of the potential pitfalls and with the convoluted process of applying for university fresh in my mind, I was keen to make an early start in looking at possible options abroad.

I was fully expecting countless fruitless inquiries, unanswered emails, and a rising sense of panic as my time abroad loomed threateningly on the horizon, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

I was initially resigned to having to organise two placements, one in Germany and one in Italy, but when talking this predicament through with a friend he suddenly said, "Didn't you know there's a German-speaking part of Italy?"

A few speculative Google searches revealed that he wasn't taking advantage of my sketchy Italian geography.

There really was a German-speaking Italian province, South Tyrol near the Austrian border. More Googling led me to a boarding school in Brixen, a bilingual town among the Dolomite mountains of northern Italy.

With nothing to lose, I wrote an email in German to the head teacher asking if they would be interested in employing an English language assistant. The level of advance planning – I wrote in January 2013 – combined with the distinct lack of vacancies for English language assistants meant I hadn't expected a response.

To my surprise, a week later I received a reply saying they would be very pleased to accept my offer. Although I wouldn't be paid, I would be given free accommodation and food in the school.

A few months later, I went to Brixen to visit the school and thoughts like "what pretty mountains" were quickly replaced by "what large and potentially inaccessible mountains".

But I needn't have worried – the school is a comparative haven of accessibility, with wide corridors and functioning lifts, which had been in short supply at Durham.

Best of all, the school is undaunted by employing someone with a disability. I was open about being a wheelchair user from the very start. But rather than recoiling in horror, they saw it as a welcome challenge.

Given that both German and Italian are official languages in South Tyrol, I will no doubt experience some linguistic challenges of my own. Before I visited, I was half expecting a kind of Dantesque limbo that wouldn't be surprising in a town with streets named both "via Dante" and "Goethestraße", but in reality most people are fluent in both languages.

A notable exception was the man in the railway station office, who I was informed "only speaks Italian". The school itself is largely German-speaking, but at least I know where to go if I need to practice my Italian.

I returned a couple of weeks ago for a final visit before I start my year abroad in September and everything was reassuringly familiar, even down to the charmingly inaccessible Italian trains.

When I began my journey in Austria and asked about arrangements for wheelchair users, their reaction was as stunned as if I had asked them to name Pi to 28 places.

I'm sure there will be moments when I question what on earth I'm doing in the middle of a large mountain range, but I'm used to towns not designed with wheelchair users in mind.

After all, in moving from Durham to Brixen, I'm just swapping one cobbled town with a cathedral for another. Let's hope I can remember the German and Italian for "Sorry, I haven't booked assistance..."

(Source: TheGuardian)