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A lot of people battle health issues. Some health issues are not so obvious. You look at them and they look healthy and sound healthy. There are, however, two kinds of conditions that are obvious because they show up externally. Neither is probably life-threatening to the sufferer, unless the condition is extreme, but it’s the way other people react to it that makes life especially difficult for the sufferer. When I was at school there was a girl in my class who suffered from an unusual skin condition. Parts of her body that were visible, such as the leg and face, were covered in large patches of what looked like third degree burn scars. No one knew what it was and the girls cruelly labelled her ‘lurgies’ which means, bag of germs.

Obviously no one ever caught whatever she had but it didn’t stop the girls from being mean. There are many such external conditions that not all of us understand. In recent years, I’ve noticed an increasing number of people with vitiligo, a condition in which the individual has patches of white skin, these patches gradually increasing until most of the individual has white patches where they have lost the melanin. If people don’t know what this is, they can be quite afraid, try to keep their distance and not touch anything they’ve touched. It doesn’t appear to be contagious and may be a genetic thing. But the individual still feels subconscious around people in case they act weird.

About 6 months ago I saw a young girl standing outside on a busy street handing out flyers for a salon. I was shocked when I saw her because I was convinced she’d been punched in the face. Her left eye had a huge black bruise. Concerned, I went over to her and asked what happened. She said it was a birthmark but I was not convinced. The mentally challenged have the hardest time, I think. Depending on the challenge they face, folks either are afraid of them or they feel sorry for them. Every few weeks I see a dad and his autistic son. At first I didn’t know he was autistic and must confess that when they first got in the lift with me, I was quite nervous. I thought he was mentally ill and could be dangerous because of the strange way he kept shuffling about in the lift. After that I see them regularly in the supermarket and notice how the father has a hard time doing the shopping as well as controlling him. The dad instinctively knows that his son makes other people in the shop nervous and moves his son away from them. I’m sorry to ask this, but I wonder why he takes him out shopping. I don’t think he’ll ever benefit from it. I don’t believe he’s even aware of his surroundings.

And, if he is, I don’t think he’ll remember the experience later on. Seeing him, sort of reminds me of a scene from Rainman when Tom Cruise takes his autistic brother, Dustin Hoffman, to a doctor for help and tells him, ‘He lives in a world of his own’… Maybe the boy is partially aware of his surroundings and maybe he isn’t but I have seen other people give the young boy and his father a ‘look’. Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s curiosity and maybe it’s the look of ‘why’. Just last week I was having coffee in a food court and noticed that a man sitting two tables away clearly had mental health issues. The whole time he sat there, he looked straight ahead at no one and would occasionally burst into silent laughter. It’s like he was looking at and listening to an invisible person in front of him. He made several strange gestures in the air with his arms and hands, sometimes in front of him and sometimes off to his side. This went on for about an hour. He then got up and proceeded to ask everyone nearby for Dh5, presumably to get something to eat. Most people dismissed him with a wave of their hands, except for two who did give it to him.