International Stammering Awareness Day (ISAD) | Ahmedabad SHG

 Watch stammering Awareness programme-

Pradip’s review on ISAD-

22nd October is International Stammering Awareness Day and we at Ahmedabad SHG, TISA celebrated it a day before. Members who participated gathered at decided location in morning 6:45. Parimal Garden is blessed with wonderful nature and great atmosphere.

After the arrival of everyone we started our first round of the day ,in this round every member had to give speech in front of TISA members and also the people in that park on the topic of stammering. In this activity we have to share our experiences of stammering which included our bitter and good experiences as a stammerer, how does it feel to be a stammerer, which steps are to be taken to manage stammering, how life has chnaged after joining TISA and much more.
Every one gave very good speech and shared their experiences and their views on stammering. We were getting good amount of support from random public who was there to listen our speech, they appreciated our effort, we were so glad to have this kind of response.

After the successful completion of our first activity we moved on to our 2nd round of activity in which we had to perform a role play in group so we decided a topic which says ‘how the world will be if 99 % people would be stammerers (transfluent) and only 1% fluent people’ in which a boys who is fluent and his family go for a marriage proposal to the family of girl who all are stammers, that was a great play we all enjoyed a lot.

Last activity we had gone to do a stammering survey by personally approaching the group of people in that park, we asked them many stammering related questions and told them to give their honest views towards stammerers, their behaviour towards stammerers etc, there was a great supporting public and they gave us answers and their views very openly. In fact, we got answers like there are times where ‘normal’ fluent people feels that we (stammers) have made boundaries around us which hold them not to involve and intervene, they had requested not to hold back, ask to take a lead, wanted us to reach out more people and educate them about stammering, emphasised on families supportive role which in turn will change everything around the person who stammer. We were very pleased with this experience of meeting new people. It helped us to desensitized.

That morning was one of the greatest morning of all the TISA members and we are hoping that we will do a lot more public sessions like this. More power to Ahmedabad SHG, TISA.

Rahul’s review on ISAD-

We had planned our meeting in parimal garden as there are many people there in morning. We choose a stage there and put our banner stating Haklao Magar Pyaar Se. There were few people who saw our banner and us but none of them actually spoke to us. They were just busy in themselves.
We had planned 3 activities:

1. Giving our opinion on stammering on stage:

Each one of us used this opportunity to speakup our mind on stage. It was a different kind of experience speaking in public on stage though there were only few people who were actually looking at us. Most of them were busy in themselves.

2. Live stage performance:

We played the meeting between boy and girl family. Here boy was among 1% fluent people and rest of us were stutterers in majority. There was a taboo for being fluent. It was a reversal of our real world. We tried it once, it was a good attempt. But vipul bhai wanted more crisp in it. So we played it one moe time, this time with vipul bhai. We played better with him.

3. Stuttering Survey:
1. Vipul bhai’s friend: luckily we found him in park. He was patient enough in answering our questions. His suggestion for us was to interact more and more. He was also in view of avoiding too much struggle while speaking through substitution or other way of communication.
2. A theatre group: vipul bhai spoke to one of them for survey. They politely told him that after finishing their practice, in 5 mins they themselves will come to us. We found them more open minded. Their view was to accept our speech and not to avoid meeting new people. They also pointed out that sometimes people want to interact with us but we ourselves go in to cocoon. Most of them had met with a stutterer in their life and had a positive image of them.

I want to mention one more incident here. After conclusion of our meeting, we found that traffic police had pickedup vipul bhai’s 2 wheeler from no parking zone. Vipul bhai and 3 of us went there. Vipul had an argument with the police guy. First police guy tried to threaten him but he and smit continued to argue with him. Later police went soft and agreed to hand over his vehicle to him. Vipul and smit were not scared to argue with police guys once they believed they are right.