Decent Work and Facilitator skills

Not feeling very well so won't write too much today......

Yesterday in the morning Hideko san, a lady who has rheumatism when she was a teenager so now she's a wheelchair user shared with us her experience. She's now working in INAX, one of the largest company in Japan.....er......they sell toilets and some other stuff including interior designing. Amazing...18% of employees there are people with disabilities.
That's Ms Hideko in the middle, behind her is her helper, a service from the government if she needs one.
Afternoon we had the lecture on right of decent work for PWDs. What is Decent Work? Many explanation.... work with dignity, meaningful work, etc.....Matsui san, (the one on my right) was telling us the different convention, resolutions of the right of PWDs to have decent employment.

Today we had Ikezumi san teaching us facilitators skills. He started by asking us to write down what we call People with disabilities in our own country.

China

In Malaysia the government's term was "Orang Kurang Upaya" OKU, People lack of Abilities. I shared that most of the PWDs would like to change the "K" to "Kuat", People with strong abilities and Ikezumi san likes it very much, says we should advocate to the government to change.

Japanese. There was another term, Sho Gai Sho but Matsuura san said she prefers to use this term when doing translation as that one is very negative.

That's Matsuura san, Ikezumi san and Take san on the right just came back from Ghana as a JOCV(Japanese Overseas Cooperation Volunteers) volunteer and was interested in observing what we do in this course. The session is very interesting. Ikezumi san used very simple illustrations, no laptops, no projector. There r 2 different types of Education. 1 is "Education of Authority", putting in ideas and the other one is "Education of Change" which is drawing out ideas. Which one do u thing is better?

He also shared with us about 5 points on important Principles/Philosophies behing Faclitator:

1. Everyone has rich experience, knowledge, skills & power (including children)
2. Start with what people know,concern/interest. Build on what we have.
3. Change is possible!
4. Change comes from inside...(waiting is important)
   
5. Process than content. (He wrote down this quote, Democracy cannot be developed through the Authoritarian way and he demonstrated it. I laughed and told him that's how our government is behaving.....telling us there's democracy but ruling us with authoritative ways!)

My medicine, pills for cough and the powder is for cold.

Ok enough blogging. Went to see the doctor after Japanese class. Thank goodness JICA provide this facility here in TIC. Gave me medicine for cough and cold. Very drowsy now. Funny thing is I bought all sort of medicine from Malaysia and MC was telling me to get cough syrup and I told her dun need becoz I wouldn't be getting it. And first thing I got...cough. Irony....