DEF Scholar: Edward Ndopu
Age: 18
Gender: Male
Home country: Cape Town, South Africa
Activities: Drama, public speaking
An active member of the ALA student community, Eddy wants to become Africa and the world’s leading advocate for people with disabilities.
Edward’s Dream:
My story is woven into the socio-economic tapestry of youth with disabilities, the poorest and most marginalized of the world’s youth – my community… a forgotten society. I am a product of a formal education not because the educational institutions I attended adopted a pro-disability education system but because my mother refused to concede to the stereotypes of the life of a child with a disability – uneducated, vulnerable and neglected. At the age of seven, the prospect of a formal education was beyond what words could express. It needed a paradigm shift, a belief that I was equal, in every sense of the word, to my able-bodied counterparts.
I thrived in a mainstream academic environment. Eleven years later, following my participation in the World Economic Forum, the press described me as “a remarkable young man [who is] severely disabled and confined to a wheelchair.” Point of correction… I am not disabled; I live with a disability. The former defines me by my limitations whereas the latter defines me in spite of my limitations. Also, I am not confined to a wheelchair; I use a wheelchair for mobility. The former suggests that I have been imprisoned to a life of misery on “wheels” whereas the latter suggests that my “wheels” have given me a life of relative independence. It is essential to make these clarifications, for they go beyond the semantics of political correctness. Rather, I make these corrections in order to tell a different story from the one we’re used to – a story of a world where my crooked hands and my crooked back cease to define the essence of who I am.
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I’ve been in the beautiful city of Hong Kong for almost a week now. I am here to raise money for the Diamond Empowerment Fund (DEF), my non-profit organization which is dedicated to supporting the empowerment of African youth.
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