“We are all candidates for disability”: Humanitarian worker Elisha Byalungwe on disability and inclusion advocacy from DR Congo to Uganda to Canada 

Elisha Byalungwe’s earliest memories of school were marked by frustration. He describes his home country of post-1994 eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as war-torn, with children walking to school to the sound of gunshots and parents emphasizing education as the “only hope” for raising the “change-makers of tomorrow” who would better the country. Teachers were determined, students were keen to become political leaders, and Byalungwe loved school. But he struggled to see what was written on the teacher’s blackboard. 

When he was almost nine years old, one of his teachers noticed his struggles and phoned his parents; a visit to the ophthalmologist established that Byalungwe had myopia. Unable to afford glasses, Byalungwe’s father talked to a priest at their Anglican Church who agreed to purchase them. With glasses, Byalungwe began to thrive at school. He skyrocketed from a struggling student to among the top performing pupils. 

“The moment I had glasses on, everything changed. The way I perceived education changed – I thought ‘wow this is how beautiful education can be’. I loved education much more,” says Byalungwe. “That was where I started to realize that just something small can change a child’s education for life.” 

In secondary school and university, Byalungwe pursued pedagogical studies in hopes of supporting children with disabilities to navigate school. He attended the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Bukavu, where he majored in English literature and completed a Bachelor of Education. 

“I told everyone I wanted to be a teacher to support other kids who were going through what I went through. I wanted to be a teacher because I saw how our teachers were resilient, how they were determined to teach despite conflicts and everything that was going on,” says Byalungwe. “I remembered what was going on when I didn’t have glasses, and I put myself in the shoes of other children with the same issues, who couldn’t see the chalkboard, who couldn’t hear the teacher.” 

From Byalungwe’s first day of school to his final day of university, armed conflicts in DR Congo punctured education. Gunshots flanked the schools, students dove under desks until they stopped, and parents swarmed the school to retrieve their children. Sometimes gunfire would pause school for weeks, classes resuming only when media stations announced ceasefires. Upon returning, teachers would condense all the missed material into novel, spontaneous curriculums to realign students to the pace of the national education program. Students studied from morning to evening, through hunger and fatigue. 

“There was no lunch at school so you had to go to school hungry, because your parents can only afford one meal in the evening,” says Byalungwe. 

Food insecurity remains in DR Congo; a 2022 Al Jazeera article reported that 27 million people, a third of the population, face hunger. 

“You study till five, you’re hungry, you just come home tired, but you still have determination that you have to study. We grew up in that situation – going to schools that were overcrowded, but children were eager to learn…Teachers were tired of what was going on for years and years, conflicts after conflicts. They were working with determination – ‘let’s teach these children so they can bring a change tomorrow.’” 

When Byalungwe was fifteen years old, his school was bombed to rubble. The bombardment happened in the summer months when children were home from school and armed conflicts were driving families into hiding or fleeing to other villages. No one knew about the school until a ceasefire was called in September. Children returned to school to find it destroyed. 

“There was no building, everything was down, everything collapsed, the whole school was bombed. I remember how children were crying, ‘what are we going to do, are we going to study?’ The school authorities had to tell us to go back home. They had to build temporary tarpaulin shelters,” says Byalungwe. 

Schools remain threatened in DR Congo; a February 2025 UNICEF press release reported that over 2,500 schools and learning spaces were closed, damaged, or destroyed within a month due to armed conflicts, leaving 795,000 children without education. 

“It was horrible. That was one of the most horrible moments of my education path.”

In equatorial Africa, where temperatures year-round hover near 25 degrees Celsius, heat beneath the insulation of tarpaulin becomes crushing. The tents held five to six children per desk, poring over shared notebooks and textbooks. Byalungwe says the metastasizing heat made it feel “like there is water coming from somewhere”; sweat dripped onto notebooks as students scrawled notes. When it would rain, water flooded the makeshift classrooms. Beyalungwe’s notebook once fell into the water, ruined. He was wrought with desperation, futility, and urgency. 

“Water could fill the whole space, up to your knees. You study under the water. The teacher continues teaching. Water is up to his knees, but he is still teaching, there’s nothing you can do. My notebook fell in the water in the classroom. That’s the moment when I felt ‘no, this is not how things should be, I should stop studying, never go to school again.’ There was another voice saying ‘no, keep going, make a change, support other children who could be facing such difficulties.’” 

Resilience surrounded him. Teachers waded in knee-deep water, continuing lessons. Parents remained adamant that educated children would bring a strong future. His classmates persistently studied. 

“Despite the conflicts, despite everything that was going on, parents were still pushing you, teachers were still teaching with all their energy. Colleagues are coming to school hungry, frustrated, but insistent on studying. We just became resilient. That’s when I learned that resilience is all about being persistent through difficulties and issues.”

He was emboldened to dedicate his life to helping children with disabilities persevere in education. The students he met when he later began teaching, during his second year at the Institut Supérieure Pedagogique de Bukavu, were filled with dreams. 

“Most of the kids had dreams to be politicians because we were tired of what was going on in the country. We were born in conflict, we grew up in conflict, and even now, conflict is ongoing. We all had the mind to be somebody to change the situation,” says Byalungwe. “In fragile contexts like the ones I studied in, when it comes to children with impairments and disabilities [navigating education], it is just unthinkable. I have to advocate for them.” 

In August 2018, a series of armed conflicts drove Byalungwe to leave DR Congo for a “safer place to live.”

“There was too much armed conflict, war. Really chaotic. It was ongoing again and again and again,” says Byalungwe. “You were fleeing when the country was terrible, you had to hide, you had to pass through forests. It was just horrible.”

According to a May 2018 UN report, armed conflicts in DR Congo had left 4.49 million internally displaced, including 2.7 million children, between January 2014 to December 2017. UNICEF reported that in the first four months of 2018, nearly 60,000 Congolese refugees arrived in Uganda; 61% were children under 18 years. Byalungwe reached the Kyaka II refugee settlement in south-west Uganda; by March 2022, nearly 130,000 Congolese refugees lived there. He began working in schools as a teaching assistant, translating for the masses of Congolese refugee children who only spoke French and Swahili. 

“These kids were coming, they only knew French and Swahili, and this new country only spoke English and other local languages,” says Byalungwe. “I started a new life there…The only thing that I loved to do was education.” 

He described the children he worked with as “extremely traumatized.” Some had lost siblings or parents; some had lost contact with their family members and didn’t know if they were alive. The children arrived to class distracted and absent-minded. Byalungwe remembers one girl, around fourteen or fifteen, who didn’t speak a single word for around two months. There was no psychological support integrated into the schools.

“Since we came from the same experience, I knew what they went through, the difficulty, the trauma, so I was there to help these children accordingly,” says Byalungwe. “When they play with other kids they seem okay, but they are still bleeding internally.”

Byalungwe tried to reach out to the teenage girl who wouldn’t speak, gently asking her how she was doing. At first, she would say nothing. She would sleep on her desk all class or begin crying as the lessons unfolded. With time, she began sharing what had happened to her: she had lost her father; her mother was raped and killed in front of her; she didn’t know where her siblings had fled. 

“She was really in pain. There were other children like this one,” says Byalungwe. “In fragile contexts, in emergency contexts, children come with all these issues, all the trauma, and they need support. Mental health support is really crucial in such contexts.”

The teenage girl slowly began to heal. One day, when the teacher asked a question in class, she put up her hand. The whole class, never having heard her speak, turned in shock. When she answered the question correctly, the class burst into applause. 

“It was like a party – everyone clapped, everybody was happy,” says Byalungwe. “I sensed that she was healing.”

As Byalungwe continued working, he noticed that most schools were not accessible to those with disabilities. There were no ramps or assisted devices offered to students. Some children could not climb staircases; they were “crawling on their hands and knees” trying to reach their classrooms and were stigmatized by others. Byalungwe began joining advocacy efforts to address these issues. He contacted aid organization Humanity & Inclusion (HI) Canada’s counterpart in Uganda, which had begun a program supporting children with wheelchairs and other assisted devices. In 2021, Byalungwe became their “focal person” for the refugee camp to provide insights into disability. 

“I got into a level for advocating for these children and youth with disabilities so they could study better, access quality education, and inclusive education like others.”

In 2024, Byalungwe became HI’s capacity building officer. He began working in Uganda’s Nakivale refugee camp, the eighth largest refugee camp in the world and home to over 170,000 refugees from fifteen countries including DR Congo. 

In Nakivale, HI co-launched an eleven-month project that sought to train health workers in inclusive practices for delivering sexual and reproductive health services to girls and women with disabilities. Byalungwe trained 90 health workers to identify people with disabilities, care for them, implement systems to deliver their needs, and understand stigma. He explained what disability was, describing psychological disabilities, physical disabilities, sensory impairments, and their causes. He discussed how the intersectionality between disability, gender, and sex gives rise to the barriers people face. He introduced the Washington Group Questions that assess limitations in seeing, hearing, walking, cognition, self-care, and communication to identify those with disabilities. Hours of “fruitful discussion” and note-taking followed. 

“I expanded on what caused disability and how we could remove those barriers. Most of them acknowledged that they take people with disabilities as an afterthought,” says Byalungwe. “If people are informed, if people are really informed, then things can change.”

During discussions, many health workers realized they had stigmatized girls and women with disabilities seeking help, such as information about STIs and pregnancy. Some believed people with disabilities were unable to experience sexual pleasure, become pregnant, or understand information about their bodies. One midwife admitted that she was “the first to laugh” at girls and women who sought care at the health facilities, believing they wouldn’t be able to understand anything. 

“‘Do you even have sexual pleasure, how could a man even come to you? Whenever I saw a lady who was pregnant, I was asking ‘how come this girl, this woman, has a disability and is pregnant?’” recounts Byalungwe of some sentiments health workers had held before the training. 

One health worker commented that, in the absence of sign language interpreters, he would tell patients with hearing impairments he couldn’t help them. Another shared that an elderly, amputated man in a wheelchair waited for nearly three hours without anyone seeing him; priority was given to those without disabilities. 

“They chase them away,” says Byalungwe of the services. “I was impressed by how fast, within the project, they could ask ‘what can we do now? What are the solutions we could try to support people with disabilities?’”

HI trained over 90 health workers in sign language. Signage was placed within healthcare settings to enable people with hearing impairments to communicate and navigate. In weekly meetings, lead doctors reported to HI about initiatives they were discussing, such as advocating for ramps and adjustable beds to improve accessibility. Three months after the training, uplifting stories began pouring from the health facilities. 

One midwife saw a pregnant girl with physical impairments enter the facility, immediately ran to her, and began helping her through “every single step” of the pregnancy. A patient in a wheelchair was attended to by a healthcare worker who asked them the Washington Group Questions, helped them navigate, and connected them with a community member who could check on them at home. People with disabilities were astounded at being welcomed where they had routinely been laughed at and mocked. One exclaimed “is this the same healthcare facility or a different one?”. Community-based facilitators alerted people with disabilities that things were changing; many had insisted they would not return to the health facilities where they were “stigmatized and traumatized”. Byalungwe said that much of Nakivale’s refugee population required healthcare because of diseases and sicknesses caused by hygiene conditions. He estimated that around 200 people with disabilities needed services each month.

“Last year was horrible. Now, people were welcomed. It was really amazing.” 

Now based in Vancouver, Byalungwe serves as a board chair for the Association of Refugees with Disabilities, an inclusion specialist with the Refugee Education Council, and volunteers with the Red Cross and other community initiatives. 

“I love supporting people, I’m actually a people-centered person and I love engaging with any initiative which supports vulnerable people,” says Byalungwe. “This is a passion, it is something I love doing. The most rewarding is when I see that I have advocated for something as far as disability and inclusion is concerned and there is a change.”

He says the most pressing issues in disability and inclusion work are a lack of funding, data collection, inaccessible education and healthcare, and barriers at the governmental levels. 

Data collection in emergency contexts, like refugee camps, often does not include obtaining statistics about disability – such as how many people have disabilities and what type of disabilities they have. Education systems in fragile contexts are often inaccessible to people with disabilities: doors are not wide enough for wheelchairs to enter, there are no sign language interpreters, there is no braille-coded signage. Sometimes, even when people have the will to make environments more inclusive, barriers persist at governmental levels beyond their control. 

“Inclusive education is not about having a school for the blind, a school for the deaf. Inclusive education is about going to the same school whether you have a disability or not, access to the same things, same teachers, same everything, without discrimination. In refugee camps, in emergency contexts, it’s an afterthought. You can’t think about interpreters, about ramps – there are other issues to take care of,” says Byalungwe. “Every child, every youth has the right to study, whether they have a disability or not. Funding is still an issue worldwide as far as disability is concerned.”

Byalungwe attests that everyone has a role to play in disability and inclusion efforts. He urges all to listen to people with disabilities, learn of their needs and sensitivities, challenge the “low expectations and harmful assumptions” that stigmatize them, and advocate for accessible spaces everywhere. 

“We are all candidates for disability. Anyone could have a disability in any phase of their life. Anyone could have an accident – God forbid – and they become disabled. But what if you become disabled while you live on the fifth floor without an elevator?” says Byalungwe. “We should all make sure that disability and inclusion is part of our daily living. We know that people with disabilities exist and we are here to support them accordingly.”