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bjbjm One of the things that was great for me at WID was that I met my wife. And, there
s a lot of aside from the personal parts of that there s a lot of aspects of meeting Lillian
that relate to what we re talking about, which was, Lillian had worked at CIL, the Center
for Independent Living in the late 70 s and the early 80 s and she had been involved actually
in creating the first peer support training and the first skills training curricula for
CIL and then she went off in the early 80 s and was doing some other things and then
there were a lot of people who were coming from other countries trying to learn about
independent living, and so it just pretty much by accident happened that Lillian was
very willing and was interested in meeting all these folks from other countries and so
she became one of the people who did a lot of the training for them, so in the 90 s,
I ll have to think about that, actually in the 80 s, 80 s and 90 s both, she did a lot
of international traveling and one of the things that happened when we met, was I had
been starting to think about and talk about disability culture and the idea that people
with disabilities were creating a culture of our own and when I first talked about that
a lot of people had passionate reactions to it that range from that s a great idea to
there can t be such a thing , but Lillian got it right away and one of the ways that
she got it was that she, what she saw was that no matter what society you were in, what
country you were in, people with disabilities had the same kinds of experiences, meaning
that they had trouble finding a job, they had trouble finding housing, they had trouble
getting transportation, they had trouble being integrated into society and there were different
aspects of different parts of countries, like in Scandinavia for example people with disabilities
are fairly well off, because the government funds them to live in housing and to have
equipment, but what it didn t fund them to do was to be in the work force, so a lot of
the ways people in, in Scandinavia have put it is that they had services, in fact I ve
heard many people from Scandinavia say that people with disabilities in the U.S. live
in barbaric conditions, and that s the word they use, barbaric, but at the same time they
envy the civil rights that we in theory have, so Lillian and I, started talking about that
kind of commonality that we had in looking at disability culture and different experiences
and at that point I didn t have any international experiences aside from having been once in
Mexico and once in Canada and in Mexico it was just over the border and Canada it was
a trip with my family when I was a kid, so I really didn t have international experience,
but since she had all that, and she d been actually to a lot of different international
places, so together we went and did some training and learning in, a Sweden, and Hungary, and
Germany, so I began to meet people from other parts of the world and one of the things that
was really interesting in Hungary, was that we were there doing a workshop and we went
to this city called Gior and I have to think about that, western Hungary, I think, not
sure I have that direction right, but anyway it s one of the larger cities in Hungary and
we were doing our conference there, and people were talking about downtown Gior where there
were buildings that still had steps and people with disabilities couldn t get in, so the
conference decided to stage a protest and go out in the streets and do a street protest
and that was the first street protest in Hungary by people with disabilities, and so that was
an interesting experience, and people of course made the papers and people were, wondering
what was going on, but it really empowered a lot of people with disabilities in Hungary.
well I first saw ED, I think, I knew about him but I first saw him at this actually wonderful
conference called beyond survival that was held in Denver in 19 Owner Normal Owner Microsoft
Office Word Microsoft, Inc well I first saw ED, I think, I knew about him but I first
saw him at this actually wonderful conference called beyond survival that was held in Denver
in 19 Title Microsoft Office Word Document MSWordDoc Word.Document.8