5th Day

"If I had to describe Friday, I’d probably say unusual, hard, different, and

strange. And that’s not because I had to do some hard work I have never done before. I just had to wear someone else’s shoes...

Everything started monotonous. I started my morning by taking my breakfast and thinking about what I had to do that day. I was trying to remember our schedule but it wasn’t helpful. I did not take this day so serious. But what happened changed my life. It was 9.30 when we started our music lessons. I spend some interesting time there, considering the fact that we already chosen our songs. After the music lessons the day critically changed. 

We had a special guest in our youth center. It was special to me because this person did something many of us would be afraid to do. His main aim was to console and help gay people in Estonia. He is working for an organization that protects LGTB rights and tries to find social acceptance for people who love “different”. During the time spent with this person, we had some debate about different topics and also we tried to find answers to our question. Strangely enough I found some answers for some hard questions of mine. In despite of what he was doing, he was happy, open to us and tried to make us understand the love, which we consider to be strange.

I believed our day was over. But everything was about to begin. Our “field trip” was a total surprise for me. I call it surprise not because I did not know about it, it surprised me because it changed my life and my point of view. We visited a center for people with disabilities. It sounds easy. But what we actually had to do was to “put ourselves in their shoes”. At the beginning we had an introduction about the center and every organization that was hosted there. To be honest it was kind of boring to listen to someone who talks about disabled people and their role in our society. It didn’t take too long for me to start regretting that. For the first time in my life I was offered the chance to be in a wheelchair, to “see” how blind people “see” the world, how a person uses signs to communicate and how it feels to have no hands. I believe it was a “dramatic” experience for every one of us. It was psychologically hard for us to take this experience. As hard as it was for us to deal with all that pressure, we managed to get the main idea of what we were doing there. We understood how it was to be ignored and isolated, to have no help. I concluded that most of people need this kind of experience to be more tolerant and to accept people the way they are and not to run after perfection. 

After getting back from our field trip, my mind was constantly on how we could help more disabled people and how we could involve them more in the society. It was a unique experience and a hard lesson for us to teach, but was worth it.”

Vasile from Moldova