Hats off to St Marys School - Sept 9th Disability Sensitization workshop

3 recent incidents that made me both sad and angry at the same time and made me want to do something for disability sensitization …..

1.     Couple months back, India wins 173 medals at Special Olympics in Los Angeles. Does such incredible news deserve such little news coverage?

2.     Ann Coulter, a respectable lawyer and political commentator had the audacity to call President Obama a “retard” in her tweet. Is mental disability an insult? John Franklin, global messenger for Special Olympics, who is mentally disabled wrote her a beautiful open letter where he points out that “this word should be used as a badge of honour as no one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much”. How often have we all been guilty of using the word  “retard”casually?

3.     I had invited the blind boys from the koregaon park school to my home and noticed how tough it was for my 9 year old son and several of his friends to interact with them or hold their hand while taking pictures. Are these kids that different from ours? Don’t they have the same wishes and aspirations?

So I took a chance ….

I approached St Marys and asked them if they would be interested in a “disability sensitization” workshop for their students. 1 hour – half hour story telling and half hour for learning sign language.

I was bowled over by the enthusiasm and support shown by the school , especially our Principal Mrs Mallic Kumar and our Vice Principal Mrs Rachel Kisty . We bought 50 books of “ Celebrating Differences”. This is a lovely book by Anita Iyer & 4 other authors that has 7 heart-warming stories about kids with various disabilities narrated in a manner that is simple yet fascinating for children. The goal is to introduce the idea of INCLUSION at an early age and so our kids grow into sensitive and aware adults.

 The kids read this book before today’s session.  What an amazing discussion we had, can we all learn to say speech impaired instead of dumb, hearing impaired instead of deaf, visually impaired instead of blind. All children had read the books, understood them and grasped the messages well.

And then the best part ……

Learning the Indian Sign Language (ISL). Anita taught them basic greetings and how to say their name in ISL. Unfortunately even though we have millions of hearing impaired and speech impaired Indians, this is not recognized as an official language, not standardized across the country and there is only 1 school in all of Maharashtra that gives certification courses !

We get happy when an American or British friend folds their hands and says “Namaste” and “Shukriya”, imagine how happy a hearing impaired child would be if our kids could sign to him or her, how inclusive that child would feel.

Today, was a beginning, we have 2 more sessions scheduled with 4^th and 5^th graders at Marys, hope we can have many more sessions at Marys and other schools, hope we can help build a more aware, inclusive and sensitive future gen !