Driving a car as a vision impaired, motorcycle as a physically disabled, participate on sports-, and experience programs?

Yes, this is what we offer this year on 7th September in the third times held Barrier-free Tourism Day in Orfű (near Pécs).

All-day happy fest, events, market and besides opportunity to try activities that as disabled person you can’t at all or difficult. You can have fun as disabled and able bodied, as adult and child, while you can discover that the our injured fellow are same people like you, how can we help each other and help is a good feeling.

The event will be international this year. We will provide free lunch to the disabled people, assistants and volunteers, just as before.

The event’s main organizers are: Gyeregyalog.hu Association, People First Association, Orfű Tourism Association.

Follow us on the Facebook and we are looking for your comments on akadalymentes.turizmus.nap@gmail.com

We can continue our sticker projekt in the framework of “Supporting of professional programmes of local, regional and national disabled organisations” FSZK application program.

199 applications were received for the deadline 19.04.2019. The under-secretary of the Ministry of Human Resources supports in the “B”of activity (Disability Projects) 50 applications, including the “Accessible Pécs!” People First project.

We held a general association meeting on the last day of June in “Speckó” escape room.

We talked about possibility of work for our members, trainig abroad, organizational changes,  acceptance of new members, evaluating and continuing our projects, tasks ahead and ideas of our members.

We won’t be bored the rest of the year either! 🙂

Thank you for participating!

Today we took part in a realy forward-looking, constructive workshop with the local service providers in theme: improving the life situation of the local disabled people.

The today’s dialogue involved the University of Pécs, the Hungarian Post Office Ltd., the local district heating company, the City Management Ltd., local government representatives, OTP (the main Hungarian bank), the Bishopric of Pécs and the School District Headquarters of Pécs.

In the future work the local bus company and the Hungarian railway company will also be involved.

Do you remember when we were a child and the doctor discussed with our parents first how ill we are, what our symptoms are?

As an adult, wouldn’t a similar scenario hurt bother or even annoy us? Unfortunately disabled

people still face distinction like that. The doctor, the administrator or even the man of the street would contact the healthy person/assistant that escort them. It’s even typical in case of blind people, maybe because a visually impaired person usually can’t make eye contact with the person who wants to talk to them. Because of that people mostly don’t even bother trying to talk to them, they’d rather talk to the accompanying even if their words aren’t meant for them. If people don’t directly talk to a blind person and they can detect it from the context it obviously hurts their feelings.

Though people living with visual, hearing or locomotor disability can perfectly understand and reply to us.

It is important that we don’t take the chance of disabled people to communicate, to share their opinions and to make responsible decisions! We can make huge differences towards equal opportunity with small things, such as address our message to the disabled person instead of their helpers. The helper’s task is not to speak instead of the disabled but assist her/him.

(Thank you Róbert Rauch for your thoughts!)

The future Disability Council Pécs want to help the task of the Municipality Pécs in relation to the disabled population. Not criticize this job, but promote it.

To help the council’s creation organised today the Pécs Community Foundation a workshop about the domestic and foreign best practises. There appeared the representative of the Disability Council from Vác, the equality spokesman from Budaörs and a represntative of more similar organization from Germany to talk about their previous experiences.

Unfortunately only the Municipality of Pécs didn’t appear what we don’t quite understand but we hope we can do common work on this topic with them too.

It might be strange that we support straws when every respectable restaurant is withdrawing those environment damaging tubes. Even though they are necessary for most disabled people so because of being barrier-free some cafés will have to keep some in their inventory – in an environment friendly form.

But why do we need straws? I’ll present it for you with an easy example, a personal experience: about six months ago I was at a conference where they didn’t have any glasses for disabled people and I thought that I’m not going to embarrass myself by using a straw, I’ll drink out of the ceramic mug. For the sake of ease I always keep my bag in my lap. Needless to say that after my attempt neither was I nor the stuff in my bag thirsty anymore under the pretext of drying on the radiator.

Inhibited people or people in wheelchairs are not only unable to move their legs but usually they can’t use their hands in all aspects. They’re missing the skill of lifting, squeezing, or they have muscle weakness but there could be many reasons that makes them unable to grip or lift a glass. However, you need to drink.

Nevertheless the mass produced unrecyclable straws are expired. We don’t stand by them either. But there are great alternatives: washable plastic and metal ones, degradable ones. These are not only environmentally conscious – the kind we like – but also appropriate for disabled people as well.

That’s how born at the same time people-, and eco-friendly solutions!

(Thank you Roland Balogh!)

The second transnational meeting was held in our Peer-AcT project on 15-17.05.2019. in Osijek. A lot of important progress has been made.

Maybe the most important edification was for us, that we will use in the future the word INCLUSIVE TOURISM instead of Barrier-free Tourism. It describes much better our goals in this project.

About the project:
http://peoplefirst.hu/…/peer-act-erasmus-ka2-nemzetkozi-pr…/

Able bodied people walk on them easily. They only get bothered by a wall-mounted car or by the pavement being torn up. The sidewalk for people in wheelchairs though is a real obstacle course.

Getting on the footway in the city centres is easier because of the recessed design of the curbs but it’s much more difficult if there is a berm. The most problematic thing is probably the ascension and the descension of electric wheelchairs because they weigh 100kgs.

And we can’t get relief even if we’re on the pavement. We have to face multitude of barriers: the sidewalk being torn up, asphalt fragments, cobbles, stairs formed in steep streets, car exits, ruptured parts from the roots of trees, uncovered drains, protruding steps, outsourced advertising signs, old quarter’s narrow though ‘romantic’ lanes, cars parked on the footway, bus stop on the sidewalk.

So we are sometimes forced to go (slowly) on the roads willy-nilly with our electric mopeds taking in account the risk of accidents, keeping the traffic, the  driver’s repatriation.

If it’s already like that what can we – people in wheelchairs do? We plan our routes early, we go on roads with little traffic, and we explore the unknown crossroads with the help of Google Map’s street view function.

(Thanks our member Zoltán Koppány for the experiences!)