Intro Redux

Howdy! For those who followed my last blog, this might inspire a bit of deja vu. For the unacquainted, I'll recap quickly: I was supposed to write a blog about my experiences volunteering at a nursing home, and about nursing homes in general. That didn't work out, as the administrators denied my request to write about the residents.

Now I'm volunteering somewhere else--Passion Works, an art shop that employs developmentally disabled people. With this blog I hope to broaden my scope a bit--I want to discuss the plight of the disadvantaged in general, including those with mental illness, in poverty, developmentally disabled or otherwise. The crux of the blog will still be about my experience volunteering, however: I want to write the stories of the people whom I help, as I don't think the media affords them much coverage.

More to the point, I think people often skirt or gloss over the issue of developmental disability because they are afraid of how to handle it--specifically, they're afraid of hurting someone's feelings. With this blog, I'm trying to, if you pardon the pun, paint a realistic picture of these people's reality, so that readers may perhaps understand their plight more fully.

That said, I look forward to starting volunteering next week. I'll leave you with a link to a recent story in The Post that mentioned the Athens Photographic Project, an initiative sponsored by NAMI, the National Alliance for Mental Health, that setup a photography class for the mentally ill. You can find it here. Ciao, bella!