Special Lecture “/BE/STRONG” for the young generation

It was my pleasure to be invited by Dr. Budsakayt Intarapasan, The Assistant to the President for Student Development of King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), to be her special guest speaker at the university. She initiated a project called “Project X / Extreme Living”, dedicated to educate young generation of people of disabilities to prepare them before leaving to the outside world. The lecture consisted of 23 futures of the nation in total. They came from all around Thailand.

“The outside world is accessibly uncomfortable, so I just want to stay home.”

This was a sincere confession from a person in the group.
And I had known that it’s an existing cold fact we’re confronting in our daily life for long ago.
Until now, wide ranges of poor accessibilities were still much prevalent in our so called modern society.
Some authorities didn’t leave their comfortable lives to seriously tackle this problem, which was seemingly unrelated and unaffected by them.
So in this area of improvement, we didn’t rock the boat, but we didn’t get very far either.

“Poor accessibility destroys the motive and incentive of the disabled to get out of their home.
Poor accessibility also prevents further development in vast dimensions.
These are clearly why the numbers of successful disabled people, in this society, are truly small.
And the government still has to provide the huge amount of country budget to support every year”

My mission was to build inspiration on their minds to have a brave heart to overcome any obstacles.
I questioned them to try challenging themselves and went beyond just the traditional assumptions, defined by mass perception, of what the people of disabilities could and should be. No matter how poor accessibility out there was, no matter how bad and weak a society was.
No matter how suffering your health condition was, did not let yourself down.
You were responsible for your own life. I referred myself as a tangible proof of the one who never let anyone else’s insult to ruin my own life.
Yes, some vulgarities were indelible, just did not empower them and stayed optimistic.
I was conscious with this so I just positively kept moving forward to pursue for successes.

Morning section: lecturing in a classroom
Afternoon section: a survey trip on accessibility, expectedly, the Metro train system. (I thought we had shaked the BTS in some ways.)

Thank you so much teacher Jan, for giving me this great opportunity.
I hope that the stories from my real experiences could sow a seed of inspiration in their hearts just to be waiting for one day, it could come alive.

I also would like to thank to Sleepy-Nokkie and KPIX for their professional photography works as well as their vital contributions today.