Special Olympian a winner in life
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
When Derek Fernandez was two weeks old, "he had a very high fever, and they didn't expect him to pull through" his mother, Rosemary, said, her face shadowed by the fear she felt so many years ago.
Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser
"Then I started noticing when he was 3 or 4 months, he never cried for what he needed, he wasn't doing things like my two older children were, he didn't turn over from his back to his stomach like they did."
Shirley Camat, 22, of Wahiawa, is congratulated by Bryson Martin, a Special Olympics Hawaii volunteer, after winning the women's 21-and-over 200-meter race in 44.78 seconds at the Kaiser High School track.
Fernandez was among the 1 percent to 5 percent of all children whose first words and baby steps — because they come so late — are a cause for worry rather than celebration.
But they were celebrating for Derek Fernandez yesterday, as they have been every year for the past 30 years, when he climbed the winner's podium to accept two more gold medals for swimming in the Hawaii Special Olympics.
Fernandez was at Kaiser High School for the summer athletic games for children and adults with mental retardation or related developmental disabilities. Each of the 800 competitors at the games was a winner, Special Olympics spokeswoman Noreen Conlin said. That is literally so, as the program presents awards to every entrant.
Derek does not use the words mentally retarded. "The only thing that I know about me is that I'm just slow, like in reading," he said.
Schoolmates used those words, and other, cruel words, when he was growing up.
"I just cope with it, I just deal with it all the time. Some people would tease me and I would have troubles, but I coped with it," he said.
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"When I used to go to Kaimuki High School, I had this big guy that wanted to fight with me, and I didn't cause any trouble to him but he wanted to cause trouble to me.
Derek Fernandez, 37, earned two gold medals in swimming during the Special Olympics at Kaiser High.
"What I did was I ran away from him and I was hiding from him; I did a few things like that, because I was real scared of him because I didn't know what he would do to me.
"After a while, I finally faced toward him and told him, 'You know, I am not the type to fight, and I don't want to fight with you,' so then he accepted it and he walked away and we both walked away and felt nice and clear about that, and he never did bother me after that."
It is a story Derek revealed to his mother only a few months ago.
Today, at 37, Derek has just become one of the 19 members of the board of directors of Special Olympics Hawaii, a charitable organization with a $1 million budget, six full-time staffers, eight part-time area directors, and 4,000 volunteers.
He is also a full-time maintenance worker at the Blaisdell Center. Derek said he fought hard to get that job. He said he knows he is not qualified for, say, an office job there, because "I cannot read, I cannot read at all."
"I look at the words, and then I know what bus to ride on. I know the numbers of the buses." To learn about the news, every morning at 5:30, "I listen to the radio, plus I also watch it on TV sometimes."
When he looks in his address book for telephone numbers, he knows "that S, that stands for Sheila, and D is for Diane."
Do people still tease him or make jokes? Generally, "no, they don't do that any more," Derek said.
But that's not because people are more accepting of differences today, Derek said. As he put it: "Some people are, some are not. It just depends."
