Last week I went with my mom to East London. I was asked to speak at Mercedes Benz' Graduation of their learnership programme for people with disabilities.
It was a great experience. I met awesome people and had a really good time getting to know some of the people who were on the programme. I even got asked if I would 'consider' one of the graduants. That was interesting....
Going to the airport is always interesting as a disabled person. There are always challenges to overcome, but most of the time it's just hysterical.
I won a bet against my mom about where the Steers is, which was cool.
On this particular occassion, it was pretty normal with a little bit of weird. When we went through the boarding gates, they searched me, which is normal practice but this time was different. First, I had to wait for them to search another person, a woman who was probably close to 90 years old and they asked her to stand up out of her wheelchair. It took a while....
Then it was my turn to be frisked. All in all, it was a really weird situation. She said hello and whatever, and then she asked me to go into this little room, which was not normal. So I went and they closed the door behind us. It felt very sketchy, actually. I think she was new on the job because she had a supervisor and she was very.....eager to do her job and, rubbed her hands together before she started.
Nothing dodgy happened, it was just a really weird experience.
After that, it was normal. We are kind of frequent flyers and we know every one of the PAU people. It's really cool. It's like a family reunion every time we go.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Bloemfontein...
Two weeks ago - I think - I went with my mom to see our Pay-it-forward Ambassadors in Bloemfontein and Kimberley.
Now, being the people we are, clearly there was drama and hysterical situations that we found ourselves in. It started at the airport, when we were 10 hours late for our flight...
haha.
So we had to book another flight. We made the last flight to Bloemfontein for the day. We made it by 10 minutes. EPIC stress session, right there.
After arriving in Bloem we were so hungry and decided that we would go to Debonairs. I know, this sounds like a really boring story that serves no purpose, but I promise, it gets entertaining round about now.
My mom went in to order. Average. It took ages, so she came out to see if I was still in the car and not being stolen. All was good. But....there was this man....he was the car guard. He used a really annoying whistling direction system, which would be effective if anybody knew what the different whistles mean. Keep in mind that I had been sitting in the car for 30 minutes, listening to this idiocy.
I was getting sufficiently frustrated with this man. Especially because I can't get out of the car to clear the earspace. He was having a good time though, so thumbs up to him for having fun at work. What made this situation a whole lot more ridiculous was the fact that he only had one properly functioning eye.
Now, for me, I don't put a whole lot of faith in a partially sighted car guard.
Something else I didn't understand was that he was wearing glasses...
He already has one eye that is covered (probably due to surgery or something), which means that he does not need glasses for that eye, which means that the eye that was assumably 'functioning properly' was, in fact, a lot less functional than initially predicted.
This made me have no faith in the abilities of this man to direct cars. I wasn't even sure if he could see them. I try hard not to judge but looking at that situation, I'm just saying...
The rest of the trip was quite normal. Except for the fact that we stayed with people that my mom last saw 25 years ago - that's a long time because I wasn't even alive then! So naturally we stayed up until the early hours of the morning. We had to catch up. Erica, Chris and Mariet were amazingly welcoming.
Our Ambassador groups are amazing! Yvette (our facilitator) does such an incredible job with these young people. Thank you, Yvette.
After the Ambassadors meetings had finished, we met Kendra, who is six years old, has cerebral palsy and goes to a mainstream school, and her family. They are moving down to Cape Town at the end of the year. I'm so ampd!
I went with Mariet and her friends to the movies. We watched 'Magic Mike'. I'm not sure what we were expecting to see in a movie about male strippers, but our expectations were too high. The only way to deal with the awkwardness of that movie was hysterical laughter. We were pretty good at that. I had fun, though, and now I have memories of that Bloemfontein trip that I will not forget. Even though some I would prefer to forget...
:)
Now, being the people we are, clearly there was drama and hysterical situations that we found ourselves in. It started at the airport, when we were 10 hours late for our flight...
haha.
So we had to book another flight. We made the last flight to Bloemfontein for the day. We made it by 10 minutes. EPIC stress session, right there.
After arriving in Bloem we were so hungry and decided that we would go to Debonairs. I know, this sounds like a really boring story that serves no purpose, but I promise, it gets entertaining round about now.
My mom went in to order. Average. It took ages, so she came out to see if I was still in the car and not being stolen. All was good. But....there was this man....he was the car guard. He used a really annoying whistling direction system, which would be effective if anybody knew what the different whistles mean. Keep in mind that I had been sitting in the car for 30 minutes, listening to this idiocy.
I was getting sufficiently frustrated with this man. Especially because I can't get out of the car to clear the earspace. He was having a good time though, so thumbs up to him for having fun at work. What made this situation a whole lot more ridiculous was the fact that he only had one properly functioning eye.
Now, for me, I don't put a whole lot of faith in a partially sighted car guard.
Something else I didn't understand was that he was wearing glasses...
He already has one eye that is covered (probably due to surgery or something), which means that he does not need glasses for that eye, which means that the eye that was assumably 'functioning properly' was, in fact, a lot less functional than initially predicted.
This made me have no faith in the abilities of this man to direct cars. I wasn't even sure if he could see them. I try hard not to judge but looking at that situation, I'm just saying...
The rest of the trip was quite normal. Except for the fact that we stayed with people that my mom last saw 25 years ago - that's a long time because I wasn't even alive then! So naturally we stayed up until the early hours of the morning. We had to catch up. Erica, Chris and Mariet were amazingly welcoming.
Our Ambassador groups are amazing! Yvette (our facilitator) does such an incredible job with these young people. Thank you, Yvette.
After the Ambassadors meetings had finished, we met Kendra, who is six years old, has cerebral palsy and goes to a mainstream school, and her family. They are moving down to Cape Town at the end of the year. I'm so ampd!
I went with Mariet and her friends to the movies. We watched 'Magic Mike'. I'm not sure what we were expecting to see in a movie about male strippers, but our expectations were too high. The only way to deal with the awkwardness of that movie was hysterical laughter. We were pretty good at that. I had fun, though, and now I have memories of that Bloemfontein trip that I will not forget. Even though some I would prefer to forget...
:)
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