Went to the owner of KidzCare’s home not far from Mikocheni B. We had coffee and talked about the orphanage. Then her driver took us out to Kerege Farms to visit the kids for a couple hours. There were a few new members to the orphanage! This one little girl I met had lost both her arms when she was two years old to a pig. Her family lived in a village and she was sleeping in a crib-like bed with one arm hanging out when a pig wandered inside their hut and bit her right arm off. When she used her other arm to try and get the pig off her, the pig bit the other one off too and got a bit of her face in the process. Her parents died a few years later and she was sent to a boarding school that was very dirty, overly crowded and didn’t have a proper education plan in place. She would have had no future there. The owner of KidzCare found her with mud caked onto her clothing and took her in and now she will be staying here and going to the local school where she will be able to grow and use her abilities. She is a remarkable kid…by only watching me take a picture and then go back to look at it once, she figured out how to hold the camera, take a picture, review the picture, and get back to the screen to take another picture all on her own! She refused help! She even opened my zippered pocket after I put my camera away to try and get it (she loved taking pictures!). She has no problem fitting in with the other kids, she colors, eats, and plays games all on her own. She even wrote Kara, mine, and her names in the dirt and then later drew a giant heart in the dirt and stood inside it. I asked her if I could come in the heart with her and she said yes and then we just sat in it for a while. She is the definition of resilience and I can see her going far if she stays with KidzCare and continues to have the positive attitude she does! She is only nine, yet inspires me to strive for my best and use the abilities I have. We must be thankful for what we have because you never know when you will lose it. When I got home that afternoon I wasn’t feeling well and went to bed for about 4 or 5 hours with a fever, chills, achy skin, and nausea! Later that night it got really bad so my professor took me to TMJ hospital to get a malaria test, but I luckily didn’t have malaria! I must have the flu or a cold or something L
Of the world’s population, 10% of people have a disability, but in developing countries that number is as high as 80%. With disability comes stigma, discrimination, seclusion, lack of voice and marginalization to name a few. That’s hard enough without having to also deal with poverty, disease, and unemployment. The goal of the United Nations is to achieve equality for persons with disabilities and one way to do that is through mainstreaming disability in development, such as including policies in the Millenium Development Goals directed at persons with disabilities. http://www.un.org/disabilities/
In an article titled “Discussing the relationship between disability, education and employment” it was found that the common belief is that people with disabilities, even when educated, will not use their education or are less likely to enter the workforce. When you look at the statistics from a study done in Nepal, this is not actually the case, with the return on investment in education between 19.4 and 32.2%, which is quite high. They did find that persons with hearing impairments had the least return on investment in education corresponding to the lack of schools catering to those with hearing impairments. For people with disabilities, years of schooling has a positive effect on the probability of employment and factors such as age and type of disability also determine rate of employment. Although it is considerably harder for people with disabilities to enter the labour market, education does help and it was found there was a positive relationship between years of schooling and employment.
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