Ghana: Skills Training to Discourage Begging

Please describe the work you are doing here at the center.

Our goals are to discourage begging and to get integrated into society. We do skills training to discourage begging. We train our fellow disabled persons so that they have income-generating skills. We are training them in seamstress and knitting and shoemaking in order to promote self-reliance.

Why is it important to discourage begging among disabled people?

A: We don't have the respect of human beings because we are on the roadside, begging. People don't respect us. Our parents feel we are disgracing them so they want to shun and eliminate us or discharge us away. So we discourage it [begging] amongst ourselves. We let our relations with our communities come together. After that, our relationships with our communities improve and we live together in harmony.

How does training help you to get integrated into society?

From training, we become able to earn our own income. Then there's no need to ask any help from any other person. They see that we contribute to the development of the community. So we are important.

You mentioned that families want to "eliminate us." Why and how? Is this still happening now?

They see us as people with no potentials. Useless. Liabilities. They see us as cursed. We represent a bad spirit, or that the gods are angry and want to punish the family. Another thing that they say to a disabled person is that God needed to make you malfunction, otherwise you would have been even more dangerous to humanity. We are [seen as] curses within the family and we don't have any potentials. So we are useless among them. We are a liability. That's their mind.

In my case, I was 14 years old when I got polio. My parents stopped sending me to school. I sensed the danger of neglect and I appealed to Catholic missionaries to help me. They supported me to obtain seamstress training, and I lived with them. Now I live on my own and I train others to be seamstresses.

Anastasia Dare (seated) in her workshop

You mentioned something before about changes in Jirappa over the past years. Can you say more about that?

A lot of changes have happened since we came together to form a disabled people's organization. The organization has been here since 1990, and the center since 1996. We realize that we have a job to do now. Now there are fifteen women training at our center in sewing tablecloths, knitting, and other things. There are also four men learning shoemaking. We don't sit in the house. Now we are proving more abled than disabled. And these days, people are seeing us differently. They have started inviting us to functions in the community.

Another change is in how we are received at our churches. At first, they would ask you, a disabled person, not to sit on a chair. Rather we had to sit on the floor and we wouldn't be given the chance to shake hands with others or to sing with the choir. Since 1990 we have been realizing a change. We use the churches to help mobilize our members. When we announce meetings in churches, they see that we can think and do things for ourselves.

Another thing is the outreach program: disabled persons educate the public. We go and gather people and educate them that disability isn't a curse, nor is it inability. It is anybody's lot. In the houses, disabled people have been locked up, hidden. Women are traditionally not sent to school, or stopped from attending. Now girls are going more, and disabled persons are also being sent to school. We keep forms for the blind and deaf schools at the center, and parents have come to fill them out. So people have started bringing their children out.

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