By Alejandro Vazquez | GVI Mexico, Logistics Coordinator
Dear Supporters,
As World Down Syndrome Day took place on March 21, we decided to dedicate the month of March to disability awareness.
The topic of disabilities is particularly close one to our hearts because of our work with Centro de Atención Integral (or “Escuelita”) where we support children with a wide range of disabilities every day. To mark World Down Syndrome Day, all of the volunteers worked together to produce a two-hour long workshop on four key disabilities, including discussion and activities, which we delivered at Save the Children Ludoteca, Corazones and Contando con un Amigo.
We decided to focus our workshops on Autism, Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy and Paralysis.
The workshop presented simple facts and statistics on each condition and then spent the majority of the time focusing on the physical manifestations of each disability and how a person with a given disability might feel in certain situations.
We spoke about, and used images to illustrate, the huge variety of signs and symptoms of people with disabilities and asked them to recall encountering people with these signs before. We spoke about the successes of people with disabilities and gave examples of famous actors with Down Syndrome and Para-Olympians.
We also presented a number of activities that were designed to show the children how people with disabilities might experience different situations and face various struggles, for example, limited vocabulary, physical disability and hypersensitivity.
I think the most important achievement this month was the unanimous acceptance by the children of our overall message in this workshop: that as people, our equality is important because we all have the same rights and it is unfair to discriminate against someone because of their appearance or their abilities. Furthermore, the children agreed that if we have the good fortune to know someone with special needs, we should always try to offer them our friendship, support and acceptance as our peers and our equals.
Thank you for your continued support of this project!
With Gratitude,
GVI Mexico
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