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| Grace Fomuluh is also a militant of the CPDM |
But this theme is fraught with
barriers, according to a leading campaigner for the rights of physically
challenged persons.
“When they talk of removing
barriers, we have psychological, financial educational and environmental barriers,”
Grace Fomuluh who is the Managing Director of the National Center for the
Rehabilitation of People with Disabilities (CNRPH) said.
Fomuluh regretted that most people
seem to ignore these and “society is creating more barriers than bridges for
persons with disabilities to cross”
Fomuluh spoke to NewsWatch when she
opened a one-day workshop on inclusive education for all at the National Center
for the Rehabilitation of People with Disabilities (CNRPH) in Yaounde recently.
In Cameroon with a total population
of about 20 million, people with disabilities constitute 15%; about three out
of the twenty million Cameroonians.
If Cameroonians truly want an
inclusive society in which physically challenged persons steer affairs that
their fully fledged counterparts are given pride of place in, children with
disabilities shouldn’t be locked away, Fomuluh explained.
She added “we just listened to the
testimony of a mother of a child with disabilities who said she stigmatized
herself. She chains her at home because wherever she goes with the child, she
is seen as a nuisance to the public.”
Grace Fomuluh vehemently discourages
such heinous and archaic practices. “For a person we are building an inclusive
society for, that person does not deserve to be locked up in the room. So the
first point is to sensitize the population on their attitude towards people
with disabilities.”
Families that have members with
disabilities should treat them like human beings, she advised.
“Look into their situation right
from the very early ages, even from the time when the children are in the womb
because the question we should be asking ourselves is: How do some of these
disabilities come about?”, Fomuluh reiterated.
According to the Managing Director of
CNRPH, “If you see a young girl who takes in and is unwilling to keep the
pregnancy because it was unexpected, she will look for a means to remove the
baby and when it doesn’t come out the next thing is that she could bring forth
a child with disabilities”
“And when these children come out
they are treated as though they chose to come out with those deficiencies.”
To policy makers, Grace Fomuluh also had a
message: “we have realized even in Yaoundé that, there are institutions where
our children are forced to stay in the same class after they are promoted from
to the next class because the class to which he or she has been promoted to
found upstairs and not accessible to the child because of his or her
deficiency.”
“Everything should be done to give
these kids access to education so they too should feel Cameroonians at all
levels of their lives for they did not choose to be disabled”.
By organizing this round table, Fomuluh
said, “we feel that by the end of the day the people who are here will serve as
ambassadors to this institution and to many other institutions in Cameroon
because we also have private welfare institutions that cater to the needs of
children with disabilities. The founders of those institutions are here with us
so that when they go back they will preach the same message to whoever they
meet”.
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