Canadian man with Down syndrome wins 2009 Celebration of People Career Award

From The Ottawa Citizen in Canada:

At 9 a.m. Marco Casalese (pictured), bundled in winter attire, is already waiting outside the doors of the Bells Corners Pizza Hut on Richmond Road.

The recipient of a 2009 Celebration of People Career Award, Casalese, 39, who has Down syndrome, has been working at Pizza Hut for the past 18 years. He is the longest serving employee at the Bells Corners location.

The awards recognize contributions to the community by people with disabilities, as well as those who support accessibility and inclusion in the Ottawa area.

Once the doors are unlocked, and a fresh pot of coffee is brewed, Casalese goes about his morning routine like he does every Monday to Friday. He breezes through the morning tasks -- arranging place settings, moving tables, vacuuming, and prepping stations for the day's crowd.

Casalese took the job at Pizza Hut supported by Y's Owl Maclure, a co-operative centre in Ottawa that assists people with disabilities, including in the workplace.

"He's offering help. He's doing his job and more," store manager Iyad Abuerrub said about Casalese's contribution to the store. "We love him, all of us."

Also honoured with a Celebration of People award was Hubert Chrétien, son of the former prime minister. His love of scuba diving is at the heart of his recreational scuba school for people with disabilities.

Five years ago, he quit his career in the high tech sector to pursue scuba instructing full-time.

He sold his home in Ottawa, and relocated to Gatineau, where his new house on Rue De l'Escale includes a heated indoor pool. Here he runs his charitable school, Freedom at Depth.

Chrétien is the recipient of the 2009 Education Award.

He designed his house to be accessible to people of all ranges of disability, with two elevators, a lift to get students out of the pool and wheelchair regulation-sized pool decks.

Chrétien has been diving since he was 11, and has been an instructor for 18 years. He said he was exposed to people with disabilities as a schoolboy and realized the feeling of weightless underwater could provide them with a sense of freedom.

"What diving does," he said, "is it takes the wheelchair out of the wheelchair sport. So it changes the environment. It's a normalizing thing."

Chrétien's students complete the same training required for all certified divers, with a few amendments to the pool program, including more hours of training for those who request it. They are also taught to use breathing for buoyancy control, something even many experienced divers can't do well, he said.

"Diving being such a cerebral sport, it doesn't matter what your disability is," said Chrétien.

From June to late September, he takes his students to the St. Lawrence River for open water dives. The excursions are very inclusive, with able-bodied and disabled divers on one dive boat.

"When we're on a dive boat, often on the first dive nobody wants to dive with us, and then they see us dive and the next day everybody wants to be my secondary buddy," Chrétien said.

Chrétien is the only person in Canada qualified by the Handicap Scuba Association to train other instructors how to teach people with disabilities.

What is rewarding about teaching people with disabilities, he said, is each of his students is different, each a new challenge.

"They're performing in a way that gives them pride," he said about his students.

In the past he has had some celebrity dive partners, notably former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who he said was an experienced diver.

As for the older Chrétien, he said with a laugh: "I love my father to death ... but my father is not very aquatic."

As someone who does technical cave diving, white-water rafting and kayaking in his spare time, Chrétien has made a lifestyle out of water sports. He said he wants the same thing for his students.

"I want this to be a life-changing experience and to be an activity they're going to do all their life."

Celebration of People also honoured Special Olympic medalist Christina Judd-Campbell, with this year's Youth Award in Memory of Susan Meyer, which recognizes personal achievement.

A member of the Ottawa Rhythmic Gymnastics Club, Judd-Campbell, 22, who lives in Chesterville, competed in the 2007 Summer Special Olympic Games in Shanghai where she won five medals for Canada, one gold and four silvers. She started doing rhythmic gymnastics six years ago because she was looking for something to do, she said, but continued because she enjoyed it.

She still remembers the excitement of attending the Olympics.

"Everywhere we went we had a police escort," she said. "There were families gathered all around watching us going into buildings."

Competing in the third of four levels, Judd-Campbell said she wasn't stressed during competition. It's what she likes about the sport, she said.

As an advocate for the Special Olympics, she also speaks at events and schools about the Games and her own journey as an athlete with intellectual disabilities.

The Celebration of People awards dinner was held in Ottawa on Dec. 3, which coincided with the UN-designated International Day of Persons with Disabilities.