Ghada Zomlot begins her community journey with the youth program “Wasla”

To gain new knowledge or skill, you might look for it in a book or maybe you’d understand some of the other people’s experiences, or you would prefer to venture yourself and have an experience that opens up your knowledge that affects and be affected by you, and gives you a special character with its characters and stages and your immersion in its events.

Here, my memory takes me back a little bit to the training program Wasla, in which I found the connection of a human to another, the connection of idea to idea and right to duty. I found in Wasla what I did not find in other programs. The serious interest of the staff and their intense efforts in raising awareness and educating person with disabilities and advocating for the rights of persons with disabilities was evident through the activities that I participated in with other colleagues who were selected in Wasla program, in which I sensed the different stereotypical view of persons with disabilities that stigmatizes us by society, and the mechanism of dealing with us.

My participation in Wasla program has increased my effectiveness and awareness of my role as a journalist. I am looking forward to changing media stereotypes that view disability as either a relief view or an extra-ordinary view, when it should be directed to the human rights approach and the demand for societal change. Wasla gave me the opportunity to take my part in raising awareness of the pandemic by recording a group of podcasts that narrate the details of the pandemic and its impact on person with disabilities and without disability, in an interactive way that is close to the audience.

In Wasla, my relationships with a group of girls and young people who were motivated by ambition and passion for learning and community work have grown, and what drew me most was their intelligence in seizing the way they deal with a person with a visual disability, as each of them became aware of his mission and his role in overcoming the obstacles faced by persons with disabilities.

Wasla is a beautiful experience, and here I would like to thank all the workers on the Wasla project and the staff of the Social Developmental Forum that embraces young people and always pushes them to interact with different segments of society and raises their awareness of various issues of society.