“You are lame, you are crippled…”

22 Apr

Lila trying to open the loo door before modification

“You are lame. You are crippled. There is no need of education for you. What will you do after you have studied? Better to stay at home and look after cows and buffalos. Help the family in chores and farming.” These are the words spoken to Lila Nath Pahadi when he was 6 six years old, by his step-mother, after he had just lost his mother who died in a landslide.

Lila was born with a club foot and the attitude in Nepal to him is that the society views disability as a penance for the sins committed in previous lives. Disabled children are the most marginalized in Nepal and their education is considered a matter of charity rather than a right that every child should have.

Despite these difficulties, Lila’s determination to go someway towards righting this wrong led him to fund his own education and to found Akshar Arambha Nepal (AAN) a small organization active in creating disabled friendly mainstream schools and motivating children with disabilities to gain access to education.

I was lucky enough to meet him in Kathmandu and he showed me some of the things that he had been doing, working with schools to help disabled children into education. Typically, in Lila’s words, “Sabina Bhattari is 12 years old and reads in class 5. She is in wheelchair. Though she enrolled in the Kanti Bhairab School but they did not have a disabled friendly environment. She was feeling difficulty everywhere i.e. toilet, sitting arrangement at classroom, discriminated by friends and teachers etc. All of these activities posed her to dropout time and again.

In this situation we (AAN) intervened at school and modified existing toilet with commode, spray pipe, grabber handle, disabled friendly door and wheelchair round space inside the toilet, disabled friendly chair at classroom for her comfort sitting at classroom, teacher training and speech competition about importance of inclusive education, disability and education among the school students. All above activities played significant role to feel her comfortable at school. She passed her grade 5 with good marks and happy at grade 6. She wants to give many thanks for Akshar Arambha Nepal-AAN and ask us to come at school continuously to monitor their education environment to vibes positive impact continuously.”

AAN is just one of the overseas organisations we support and, if you’d like to know more about them, look at their website http://aanepal.org.np