In just a few months, the Maltese disability sector lost two pioneering women activists: Rita Vella Borg in June and now Marianne Debono. Two very different individuals who shared a passion for creating a more inclusive, equitable Maltese society.

I first met Marianne in 1994, when I became part of the exceptional team that was the Kummissjoni Nazzjonali Persuni b’Diżabilità (KNPD). Both of us were adjusting to a new, and daunting reality: I was about to assume the chairmanship of KNPD; Marianne was just out of a lenghty, harrowing, hospital stay.

Frail as she was, she soon returned to her tasks with determination and total commitment. In the 1990s, thanks to public and high-level political backing we set up a significant number of essential services and service agencies. Best of all, we saw the drafting and passage into law of the Equal Opportunities Act of 2000 (EOA) which, for the first time, outlawed discrimination on the grounds of disability.

To ensure that the EOA did not remain a dead letter, KNPD set up an Equal Opportunities Compliance Unit (EOCU). We all agreed that the ideal person to manage the EOCU was Marianne. Like all of us, she learnt on the job. The work was interesting, but it was also completely absorbing and utterly exhausting.

Naturally, she would be the first to insist that her work was possible thanks to the support of her work colleagues and, most especially, to her devoted son, Stanley, who, besides being her primary carer, kept up a demanding full-time, senior position. Such is the level of sacrifice that many people with disability and their carers make to become productive members of society.

For her to have kept up with that pressure of work and coped with her increasingly frail state of health from 2000 to her retirement in 2014, was nothing short of heroic.

Marianne was also a committed member of the Malta Muscular Dystrophy Group to which she dedicated what other energy she could.

When our abysmal access to the built environment allowed, she loved going to concerts, plays and exhibitions. Finally, for as long as it was possible, she contined to read widely and to follow the world of politics. Not Malta’s inbred, tribal and ultimately self-defeating quarrels, but the wider world of political theory and debate.

Up to the very end, Marianne had amour-propre, that is a sense of self-esteem: a pride in herself as a mother, as an activist, a work colleague, a person with disability but, above all, as a strong woman “… an intelligent woman, a courageous woman, a loving woman, a woman who [taught] by being”. (Maya Angelou)