Reporting on trip to WFDB workshop at Kenya!

Dear friends,
I would like to share exciting news with you all. We (Pradip Sinha -The Chairman| Sunil Abbas - The General Secretary and Zamir Dhale - The Founder of the SEDB India) went to attend the 6th General Assembly at World Federation Of The Deafblind (WFDB) hosted in Nairobi, Kenya from 24th to 29th of October 2022. It was a great opportunity to network with various deafblind leaders across the globe. We were able to share and enrich our knowledge and experiences of each one of our journey in empowering deaf-blind across geographic locations. We strongly believe this knowledge is very rich and will help us to achieve many successes. We learned and shared our experiences with each other. We learned a lot from their experiences. We also learned to understand many different laws. It was very different. We motivated Kenyan who are deaf and deafblind that they are facing problems such as discriminations against law and they were advised to overcome all difficulties and problems in their life.
WFDB is currently producing a 2nd global report on deafblindness, which we discussed elaborately and mutually agreed on the report. It will hopefully be endorsed by the UN, I do hope that we will show the globe report to the Government of India.
Some of deafblind leaders from Spain, Sweden, Ecuador, Colombia and North America are very strong advocates. They talked a lot in the discussion groups about the rights to information meaning the deafblind should have the knowledge of different laws and how to build their skills. We discussed about accessible health and technologies in advocacy work. We, the deafblind Indians, are luckily to have many deafblind advocates and lawyers in the world. Current president of WFDB is Ms. Sanja from Croatia and has completed a PHD and Vice President is Mr. Samuel from Colombia. I (Zamir) have been elected as Asia Regional Representative of the WFDB board. All of the board members are deafblind. I strongly feel that government of India will be recognise deafblind people and we need to make government officials understand that deafblind people have the rights to ask for better education, training,  access to technologies and employment. We should have equal rights like others. Deafblind people should have a separate disability as a unique disability. 
Have you ever wondered on these questions? What are your rights? What are my rights? What is the importance of advocacy? Advocacy is important because deafblind people wanted to educate people about how to help the deafblind in communication, education,  training and a good job to help them to earn equal salaries, not to depend on anyone for all help. Why does the government of India does not want to recognise deafblind as a separate category and mix deaf-blindness in disability law with Multiple disabilities. Why can’t deafblindness be a separate disability?
We believe that we will work hard to make the government to understand. We must continue to raise our voices about our rights which is still to be heard by all.

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