Bogota celebrates its 478th birthday with sports for the disabled

Bogota, Colombia's capital, celebrated its 478th birthday this week with cultural events and sports programs for hte disabled to highlight the government's social inclusion policies.

Lively competitions were carried out in six Paralympic sports which showed the will, resilience and above all the de-stigmatization of all kinds of physical disabilities.

The competitions were part of the 20th edition of the Summer Festival, a cultural open-air event that brings together many people in Bogota to show diversity within the city.

Victims of the armed conflict and those that fell in clashes or due to anti-personnel landmines explosions, are one of the main emphases of these programs.

Different foundations that work to defend the rights of disabled people joined together for the festival to offer the athletes competition spaces where their rehabilitation, re-integration and reconciliation programs could be executed comprehensively.

"Sport is a tool that allows all disabled people, and above all the people that are going through re-insertion processes, to find an emotional space which allows them to feel like human beings within society again," Francisco Javier Osejo, director of the Fundacion Arcangeles' Sport Power Project, told Xinhua.

This program takes care of 260 disabled people, 22 percent of whom have been victims of war in the South American country.

Soldiers, police and civilians affected by war in Colombia make up part of this initiative. "Through state organizations such as Victims Unit, the Colombian Agency for Re-integration and the ombudsman, our foundation intends to place sport as an indispensable tool in their recovery," added Osejo.

Wheelchair tennis, basketball and rugby, sitting volleyball and goalball were all sports that athletes from various national leagues and representatives from countries such as Venezuela, Paraguay and the United States, used to show the importance of sport when it comes to people regaining their confidence after suffering some time of disability.

This was the case for Javier Perdomo, a former soldier in the Colombian Army who was injured during a confrontation with troops from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2008, and today he could be seen in the sitting volleyball overcoming the consequences the war left on his body.

"This sport has shown me that disability is only in the mind. It is only in the head. At the moment my life revolves around this sport," Perdomo told Xinhua.

For Perdomo, forming part of Bogota's sitting volleyball team, a sport which has been included in the Paralympic Games since 1980, has been key to him realizing that what he went through in the conflict, despite its rawness, was not in vain.

"I have always been sporty but I have only really been able to excel since I joined this team. The sensation of winning a medal and being admired by other people has meant that my life serves as an example of achievement and dedication," said Perdomo.

In Bogota, 240,000 people have some type of physical disability, according to official statistics.

The figure is permanently increasing due to the fact that rehabilitation programs have become more visible in recent years, and all the time more people are registering to receive some sort of state support.

Concerts, nocturnal bike rides and birdwatching walks in the city's nature spots completed the program in the Summer Festival's most inclusive edition in Bogota. Enditem