“Nothing About Us Without Us”

Once again, I had an oppurtunity to be involved in a training in Bangkok which was organized by APCD and JICA. It was a little bit different from the first training that I had attended. This time, the participants of the training were not only people with disabilities but also people without disabilities whom are workers of Community Based Rehabilitation programs in the Asia Pacific Region.

As a Sign language interpreter for Fachri Siradz from Sehjira Foundation and as a representative of Gempita (Sehjira’s partner),  I have gained more knowledge about the importance of working with and in the community level. Why in the community? Because sometimes we forget that we are all belongs to a community and this way of thinking make us tend to make plans with a very high expectation, such as : changing the rules and changing this world. But in order to achieve it, we often neglect the steps that we should have taken to achieve our big goal.

Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) believes that in order to change the world, firstly and more importantly we have to try from a very basic level, grass root level, changing the mindset of our own community  and the people who lived in it.