STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Susan Sygall watched an instructor at Swiftsure Ranch put a horse and riders through his paces.

 “A horse’s gait mimics a human gait. It provides stimulation that you don’t get if you’re not walking,” the ranch’s executive director Meg Stamper told her.

Sygall then turned to a dozen Swiftsure instructors and volunteers , challenging them to do what they do on a world scale, volunteering their skills in countries that don’t have equine therapy programs like Swiftsure’s.

“You’re all here because you’re people changing lives, and that’s what I do,” she said. “You might be the person to change the lives of people in other countries, as well."

Sygall, co-founder of Mobility International USA, has spent this week in the Wood River Valley as a guest of the Family of Women Film Festival. She followed up her visit to Swiftsure by talking to the I Have a Dream Foundation and Blaine County School students.

She will discuss her efforts to empower people with disabilities today at 11 a.m. at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Ketchum in a talk that is open to the public.

Sygall grew up skiing and horseback riding, thanks to the athletic genes she’d inherited from her mother, a World Champion Austrian figure skater named Lizzy Koenig who skated with Sonja Henie. But she had to figure out how to express her athleticism differently after an automobile accident.

“Now I call myself a wheelchair rider—the wheelchair is my vehicle for doing what I want with my life, my means of getting around,” said Sygall, who teaches Global Perspectives on Disabilities at Oregon State University in Eugene.

And get around Sygall has. She’s hitchhiked in her wheelchair through New Zealand and traveled by overland buses through Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. She’s got a million miles on United Airlines. And, using a tricycle with an electrical assist, she biked the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and through parts of Italy.

It’s not just idle travel.

Sygall’s Mobility International USA strives to empower people with disabilities around the world.

She spearheaded such gatherings as the 1995 International Symposium on Women with Disabilities in Beijing and eight Women’s Institute on Leadership and Disability (WILD) programs.

There are still countries where disabled people are not out in the mainstream of society, Sygall said. Less than 1 percent of disabled women and girls in developing countries are literate. They’re less likely to marry and they’re more likely to be abused.

Most countries have legislation regarding disabilities but they don’t enforce them, Sygall added. The good news is: There are disability rights groups forming across the world.

It wasn’t that long ago—1977, to be exact—that disability rights began to take shape in this country.

That’s when 150 disability rights activists took over the fourth floor of a federal building in San Francisco demanding that President Jimmy Carter’s administration agree to implement a four-year-old law protecting the rights of people with disabilities.

The sit-in—the longest unarmed sit-in the history of the United States—paved the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“Even in this country we people had to rise up and say we want to be included,” Sygall said. “Historically, even the women’s movement didn’t include people with disabilities. We had to work to open the pipeline.”

Sygall has had 2,300 people from 135 countries attending Mobility USA gatherings in Eugene, Ore., and elsewhere, in part because people with disabilities don't have an opportunity to share their stories and information.

For many, it’s the first time they’ve seen curb cuts or buses with wheelchair ramps. Deaf people are shocked to find out that deaf people can drive in America. Blind people from India are intrigued by the canes that Americans use—they make their way linking arms in a train of people...and they don't typically venture out in public much.

“Some women from Pakistan said it was the first time they’d ever gone somewhere where someone didn’t call them a name,” she said.

Sygall has co-founded a women’s disabled basketball program,says her organizations organizes campouts, plugging power chairs into outlets. They do wheelchair gymnastics and they go to regular dance classes.

She noted that while it’s important to provide assisted equine therapy, it’s also helpful to provide places people with disabilities can ride horses just like those without disabilities.

“Some of my most favorite moments have come on top of a horse. It’s like euphoria," she said. "I think all recreation is therapeutic.Physical activity is therapeutic. It provides self-confidence and enpowerment. It gets people with disabilities to feel like who they are is whole."

Sygall's programs have helped empower women with cerebral palsy who is working to pass national legislation for human rights for people with disabilities in Armenia.

"Those of you who have been abroad know that having a world experience trampolines you so high. it can trampoline those with disabilities even higher."

Sygall introduced the film “Touch the Light” on Friday night, about three blind women in Cuba.

As she did she reminded the audience that they, too, can be agents of change—that disabled need allies.

“If you're teaching a lesson at Swiftsure, you might say, 'Have you ever thought of traveling abroad? If you’re a doctor, look at your patients in terms of their human rights in addition to their disability. If you’re a business person, hire people with disabilities... And  it’s so important to keep the ADA strong.”

Isabelle Caraluzzi, a New York University student studying international politics, said it’s helpful for her to see the Family of Woman Film Festival films and meet the speakers behind the films.

“You can read about these issues in the news and think, ‘Oh, okay.’ But when you meet real life people in the flesh and hear about their struggles, it makes the issues in the world more tangible.”

"GIRLS' WAR"

The final film in the 2018 Woman of Film Festival will be shown at 3 p.m. today—Sunday, March 4—at the Sun Valley Opera House. The film depicts why the Kurds--Kurdish women, in particular—are so effective fighting against ISIS.

Ketchum's National Mountain Bike Champion Rebecca Rusch, who starred in last year's "Blood Road," will hold a conversation with filmmaker Mylene Sauloy following the showing.