Made enthusiastic by a mother of one of the students who knew us, the headmistress of the private school ELIL phoned me to make an appointment. She wanted to visit us with her deputy and a teacher.
They came that same week, and wanted to get to know more about our work, because every year they organize a solidarity campaign among the students and staff by raising whatever is needed by a chosen charity. They’d singled out the work of our community home as their charity for 2021. Wow, that’s a great support of course! They asked what we needed. I answered our needs fit into two categories. First, we need everything a normal household needs: rice, beans, oil, cleaning products, and so on. And we also need diapers which some housemates use during the night. Secondly, we want to change how people with intellectual disabilities are looked at in society, so we’d like to raise awareness among the ELIL students by supplying visual materials about our housemates and the purpose of our work. Both requests appealed to our visitors. We gave our visitors a guided tour of our house which helped them to get an impression of how we live and a taste of the atmosphere in the house. Then we said goodbye with the promise they would let us know soon how they wished to proceed.
Follow-up
It turned out that ELIL celebrated its 10th anniversary in the week following their visit, the ideal week for their solidarity project to be implemented. Three days later I visited ELIL to receive a gift in front of a group of secondary school students, some teachers, the deputy head and the headmistress. But before we got to the ceremony of us receiving a gift, I lead a conversation with the students about what we do as the Ruach Fundación. I also made students think with some probing questions such as: ‘How do you look at a person with a disability?’ ‘What makes you decide whether you positively value such a person or whether he or she is worthless?’ Finally I gave a few hints as to how they could support our work: • make use of any opportunity to make contact with people with disabilities; • speak with respect about them, even if they have visible defects, • share your current experience with family and friends and become a Ruach ambassador, • visit us or support us with a gift.
Finally
The pictures above tell the story how many goods were loaded into the back of a car and off-loaded at our Community home. The school also made a short video (in Spanish) about us and ELIL’s visit. Together we can make a difference! We have to stay human