Paul Calvert spoke with Nader Abu Amsha, the director of the YMCA in Beit Sahour, about their holistic approach to therapy and progress being made to gain rights for disabled people in Palestine.

Paul: Are disabled children accepted well in the community?

Nader: Yeah, there is lots of moral and emotional acceptance to people with disability, but when it comes to actual adaptation, actual accessibility and actual inclusion, there is a big problem.

You find when people build homes they don't build it in a way to be friendly and accessible for people with disability. When they are building a bank they are not thinking of this very much. It was part of our struggle for a long time. Since the beginning of our programme we struggled to have this as part of the legislation.

We are proud as a YMCA to say that we developed the first draft for rights for people with disability in Palestine. We have it as a draft to send it to the Palestinian Legislative Council with the support of all other organisations. We manage to have it as rights for people with disability, including building access facilities. Now by law there is no building should be built for public use unless it's accessible for people with disability.

The implementation should be done in the same way, that's why we are monitoring, and trying to push for that; trying to put pressure on all the organisations who are not abiding with this law. It's not only about the private sector, but also about the governmental bodies and municipalities.

Paul: Why do you do what you do?

Nader: We do this as part of our mission and what we believe. The YMCA is a Christian based organisation. It's a faith-based organisation, based on Christian values and Christian basic principles. We believe the core value of our faith is love. We love everybody and this is how God did it. God loved the whole world and sent His only Son to live amongst us and to save us, to die and resurrect for our salvation. We believe that this is the whole issue about our service. Our service is to care about the community because everybody deserves the love of God; everybody deserves our interest, because everybody is in the image of God.

We are a Christian organisation working in mainly a non-Christian environment, but by doing this, by sending this kind of message, we are creating the right image about Christianity. We are sending a right image about our faith. We accept the diversity of the community; we accept that people are coming from different backgrounds, different religions, and different faith. We respect their faith, their culture, and their whatever, but we send them a message that we love you, and you are here because you deserve the love of God, and you are our beneficiaries and our colleagues. God wants us to live a decent life and not a miserable one. That's why we are doing all of this.

Paul: What is your prayer for the disabled in the community?

Nader: Our prayer for people with disability is that they might be perceived as normal as others. We call upon God to open the eyes of everybody; to accept people with disability as normal human beings like any other human being, and as a type of the diversity of our community.