Global Citizenship Day - Disability

14/03/2013

This article is written by Alice Duckett as part of her role within the Media team for the volunteers placed in Awassa, it is published for the VSO ICS program.

Raising Awareness on Disability in Hawassa

On Thursday 21^st February the VSO ICS Hawassa team held our first Global Citizenship day on disability, throughout our 12 week program we will have four GCDs focusing on issues we have noticed within the local community that we want to challenge.

For this topic the morning activities were held at AESTD – one of the volunteer placements that works with disability. Here four of the volunteers facilitated some learning for the rest of the group; we began the morning with identifying famous people with a disability and then learnt some less obvious ones who suffer with mental disabilities. We then answered a questionnaire which was passed onto the organization for their research; this was to find out more about our experiences and attitudes towards disability. The morning session finished with a quiz where we all learnt some statistics on disabilities within England and Ethiopia.

In the afternoon the team of 18 was split into four groups, these groups went out into the community to work on issues AESTD are currently backing. This included gathering signatures from the people of Hawassa for education and training services for persons with disabilities to be built using the government budget put aside to see that every child has access to primary education. In just a few hours we managed to collect 301 signatures including the manager of The World Food Program.

Kieran Gilberthorpe who helped organize the event said ‘It was great to get the team together to work on issues we are all passionate about, the event was a success and we managed to raise awareness on not only my placement organization but on problems disabled people in Ethiopia face”

To complete the day a small panel of people with disabilities that work with AESTD were taking questions from the volunteers on disability within Ethiopia and what is being done to help them and what frustrations they are facing when working on change.

Written by Alice Duckett