“There were once upon a Mother and her Son …” A personal story

Dear Friends,

In 1992, the UN General Assembly declared the 3rd December for the "International Day of Persons with Disabilities" and called on all governments to implement measures towards the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities and their full and equal participation in society.

The aid projects for people with disabilities are one of the focuses of our work. We had in the past, we have now and we will always have such projects in the future.

In our work, we strive to promote social and cultural integration of each disabled participant of our projects into the society and to enable him a full and fulfilling life.

We’d like to share with you an interesting story of one of the beneficiaries of our projects.

How to start this story? With: Once upon a time...?

Once upon a time there were actually a Mother and her Son.

They came from a distant city from the other side of our large country. They had no residence and had to rent an apartment. The Mother took three different jobs in order to secure their livelihood.

The Son was already an adult. Apparently he could be self-sufficient. But in truth his disability did not allow him to lead a fully independent life. He needed the help of his Mother.

It was difficult for the Mother to take care of everything alone. She spent the whole day going between her three jobs and their home. Sometimes she had to ask her employer for permission to leave earlier because she had to find her son, who had been lost somewhere in the city. The work and the care for her son cost her a lot of power. She had no time left for herself at all.

Once the Mother heard from her friends about the Bishop Malecki Support Center for Mentally Disabled Young Adults that could help her family. Thus, her Son began to attend the day-care center in the Ulitsa Kirillovskaja 19.

First, he felt unwell in the support center. He knew no one there; he was sitting all the time in a chair and swinging from one side to the other. If someone asked him a question, he answered, but the others could not understand him.

Days, weeks and months have passed... The Son took part in table games, workshops and sports exercises and attended various creative activities. He tried to sing, at first with his body, while he was swinging in time to music. Then he started to knock on the knees a rhythm. He painted and used noisemakers, attended theater rehearsals, talked to other people with disabilities, with staff and volunteers of the center.

The Mother told to the employees with joy, how important it was for her that her Son finally had a circle of contacts and people who like to interact with him. The Mother complained once that she was trying to teach her Son to read, and that she needed help because he did not perceive her as a teacher. The center staff started to learn letters with him. They painted the letters with colors, drew them with pens and pencils and modeled them out of play dough. Then came the summer; everyone left the center for the holiday.

As all people returned in the autumn, they revealed that the Son had forgotten no one of the letters. On the contrary, he even learned to make syllables and short words. The Son of the Mother returned to the support center as a quite another person. He began to spell the words clearly. The others could now understand him better. He maintained order in the day-care center, interacted easier with other people. He laughed more often, became more sociable and developed more and more own initiatives.

These changes were followed by the need for other, more adult relationships, for greater self-reliance, greater rights and greater responsibility.

Once the Son returned from the support center back home later and then was not seen in the center for a whole week. It turned out that he was walking around the house, went to a supermarket and decided to help the local staff to put baskets together. The time just flew by. The employees of the store thanked him for the help and rewarded him with chocolate. Thus the Son found a job and went there every day. He could not manage it yet to divide his day such way that he could go both to the support center and to work. The center staff, however, decided to help him put a suitable schedule together: In the morning he attended the center's activities, went home for lunch and then went into the store to work.

The mother was delighted how much her Son had changed. He was a different person.

She suddenly realized that her Son became a grown-up and she could not treat him like a little boy any more. She was pleased and frightened at the same time by this discovery...

This story has no end, but merely has to be continued...