Grover Center overflowed Tuesday for the International Day of Persons With Disabilities event.
Graduate students from multiple departments across Ohio University came together to organize the event. This included finding sponsors, guest speakers and student workers to help run the silent auction and informational booths.
The idea for the disability awareness event came from students in graduate classes taught by Jenny Nelson, an associate professor in the school of Media Arts and Studies.
“We were trying to raise awareness, get people to think,” said Beth Mishler, the event’s lead student coordinator and a student in Nelson’s class.
To spread awareness, disability simulations were available to highlight difficulties people with disabilities have to live with every day.
“If you have never ridden in a wheelchair, and you therefore don’t know what it is like for someone who uses a wheelchair on a daily basis, you get the chance to move around parts campus and get an idea of what that is like,” said Henry Boachi, a graduate student studying communication development studies. “Or you can simulate Parkinson’s disease with these bands we have for the feet and the arms. They sort of impair movement so you have just a feel of it.”
The International Day of Persons with Disabilities was held internationally in conjunction with the United Nation’s.
“Today is being celebrated the world over, so we thought to put together an event like this that highlights the event, and give people an idea of what this is like,” Boachi said.
Students from Nelson’s class come from different countries across the world, and they each brought their unique perspectives to the event.
“We have a very eclectic mix of international students, from Laos, from Cairo, from Russia and there was a student in there who had experience working with the United Nations and disabilities specifically, and our professor has Parkinson’s,” Mishler said. “A lot of the folks in our class are from countries like Syria, where PTSD is a serious problem, or Sierra Leone, where disabilities commissions get started for whole new reasons, like genocide, and we have all these unique perspectives in this class.”
The event was seen as a success by its leaders. Students from across campus learned about disabilities, awareness was spread, and it looks like the event will have a long life at OU.
“There’s people in our society that have disabilities and it doesn’t show, and you might not know. This will increase our understanding that we are all different, and some are just different to the point that we consider it a disability,” Larry Jageman, member of the Athens Commission on Disabilities, said.
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This article appeared in print under the headline "International Disabilities Day aims to spread awareness"
