For more than eight years, Mrs Nguyen Thi Thuy Ngan, Chair of the Association of People with Disabilities of Thanh Xuan District, has devoted her enthusiasm to organising many activities to help people with disabilities, remove barriers and integrate into the community.
With more than 2,000 people with disabilities in the district, Mrs Ngan and the association’s members have persistently encouraged them to take part confidently in the activities organised by the Thanh Xuan District Association of People with Disabilities. One task to which Mrs Ngan has devoted much effort is organising and maintaining literacy classes, taking the initiative to complete the procedures to open classes and then personally visiting homes to encourage people with disabilities to attend. In addition to funding provided by the city, she has also mobilised benefactors to provide 200,000 VND in travel expenses for each student. Mrs Ngan also volunteers as a teacher, and has mobilised a retired teacher to teach alongside her. A former high school teacher, she nonetheless faced many difficulties in helping a class of 15 people with disabilities aged 13 to 40 complete the grade 1 programme in 3 – 5 months. With each student, she learns about their temperament in order to find suitable ways to communicate and convey knowledge. Always holding the view that “When students learn from me, I learn from my students”, Mrs Ngan has learned how people who are unable to speak and deaf people communicate, in order to convey knowledge. Each course, students write hundreds of pages of notebooks, but she reads them all carefully to mark them.
Devoted to people with disabilities, Mrs Ngan has organised three literacy classes over the past three years, and more than 70% of students have become literate. To prevent students from relapsing into illiteracy, Mrs Ngan also guides their relatives on how to teach them at home. Thanks to this persistence, literacy work for people with disabilities in Thanh Xuan District has achieved positive results. Many people with disabilities have become more confident and have continued their studies at the district’s Continuing Education Centre.
Mrs Ngan said: “I am a grade 2/4 wounded veteran, and a traffic accident seriously affected my health, so I deeply sympathise with people with disabilities. Helping them stop feeling inferior and self-conscious so they can integrate into the community has now become a joy in my life”.
Hien Chi – http://hanoimoi.com.vn