Disability Employment Month has meaning for CSUMB lecturer

By Mark Muckenfuss

“Don’t feel sorry if you see someone with a disability,” said Jacques Belval, a lecturer in Cal State Monterey Bay’s department of humanities and communication. “Don’t try to treat us with kid gloves. We're tougher than you think.”

Belval’s comments come as we get ready to enter October, National Disability Employment Awareness Month. He was a part-time lecturer at CSUMB when he learned he had cancer and was told he would have to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. 

It started late in 2017 when he was at dinner with friends, celebrating the completion of two master’s degrees he had earned from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. During the previous several days he’d started having some trouble with walking.

“At the end of the dinner, I tried to stand up and fell back into my chair,” he recalled.

Soon after, doctors found he had two tumors affecting his nervous system, one in his pelvis, which was cancerous, and another in his spine, which was benign. Surgery removed the tumors, but the one in his pelvis had left him with nerve damage that resulted in drop foot – an inability to lift one’s foot to a correct walking position – and neuropathy. 

He rejected the doctors’ assessment that he wouldn’t walk again. 

“I had some colorful language in refusing that,” he said with a laugh. 

He began a rehabilitation program using a walker almost immediately and eventually getting around with a brace and a cane. These days, he can walk well enough that not everyone realizes he has a disability. 

“The other day, a student was talking to me and mentioned something about me running,” he said. “I said, ‘I can’t run. Why do you think I have this cane?’ She said, ‘I thought it was for style.’”

He uses a derby cane, a type sometimes used as a fashion accent. Belval also commonly wears a semi-formal jacket to class along with a kufiya, to show his support of the Palestinian people. His way of dressing, he recently discovered, can be a potential barrier for his students. 

“We were talking in my critical thinking and ethics class about prejudgment,” he said. “My students said when they first saw me walking into class with a cane, the kufiya and various political pins, that I was going to be this serious, hard-to-deal-with person.”

The same misperceptions can happen when it comes to disabilities, he said. Having a month of heightened awareness, he added, can be beneficial. 

On one level, he shies away from the idea.

“I think it's important to recognize our diversity and differences all the time,” he said, rather than just for a month. 

On the other hand, he said, “It’s nice, because you can focus on specific parameters and things like how the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) came about.”

Belval, who studied and worked in such places as Morocco, Yemen and Jordan before coming to the Monterey area, said he deals with the limitations he faces with “a lot of dark humor” and by continuing to strengthen himself physically. He works out in the gym to build up his stamina and, with the aid of hiking poles, goes on long hikes with his wife, Jeanna Reyes-Belval, an education abroad program analyst for CSUMB’s International Programs, and the couple’s dog. 

He is continuing cancer treatment, which is now confined to his spine, and he has dreams of running again someday.

“In the next couple of years,” he said, “I would like to try.”