New disability awareness course for the PEPY Empowering Youth students !

26/09/2018

The situation for the children and youth living with a disability is extremely difficult in Cambodia. While some people are scared of them, others believe that they deserve it because of the karma law. At Soulcial Trust we challenge this idea of “fate” by having the community to wonder what life with a disability feels like in Cambodia. Through our Awareness Classes we are mostly targeting the essential actors of the change, young children and teenagers, to raise awareness among Cambodia’s youth.

On the 19th of September, we started a 3-day-Disability-Awareness course for the students from PEPY Empowering Youth, an NGO which supports the development of education in Cambodia. Bel, the teacher of the Disability Awareness Classes who stepped on a landmine when he was 7 years old, taught them about disability and the obstacles that it implies in everyday life. As a landmine victim, he himself experienced difficulty, seeing every employment opportunity denied and his friends and some family members running away from him, and this only because of his new disability.

The Disability Awareness classes really have a real impact on students who understand more about disability. A lot of them only had limited knowledge about it. And, by the end of the three days, it is obvious to notice that the children really enjoyed the classes and learned a lot. While sharing their feedbacks, one of the students said that these classes helped her to widen her knowledge about disability, and that now she “will not be scared anymore while seeing a person with disability in the street and run to this person”. Another student who share his thoughts, told us that he is “willing to share everything that he learned within his entourage because this is really important that everyone knows more about disability”.