Bites: March and April 2002
News: Regional Assemblies
DPA believes that the assembly's strength lies in the effectiveness of its regional assemblies, which monitor issues relevant to people with disabilities and ensure that they are addressed at regional and, when appropriate, national level.
Amy joins the committee
Richmond woman, Amy Hindley, 60, (pictured), has been co-opted on to the NEC to fill the vacancy left by Agnes Sneddon. Amy only just missed out on joining the national executive in the last NEC election.
Nelson DPA has been in recession but Amy, a 'Mainlander' and committee member of NZCCS, is very motivated to try to improve the lot of people with disabilities and increase DPA membership in the Nelson area.
I think that DPA is the vehicle with which to help get things moving,
says Amy, who will push the message that people with disabilities must be included in life, not excluded. She wants to see more people with disabilities speaking for themselves and being encouraged.
An English woman who came here in 1996 to marry a Kiwi (they met on a train in England and corresponded for two years), Amy was born with spina bifida and has two artificial legs on which to get around. Occasionally, she'll use a wheel chair. She's very short, she says, without her legs on.
Meanwhile, she calls the non-disabled, 'TAPs' or Temporarily Able-bodied People. She says people did not think she would live to be 60. Nobody thought I would reach 60, so I am celebrating because I am more mobile now than I have ever been in my life. I'm a recycled teenager.
In England she helped establish an organisation called MIND, for mentally ill people (she's a trained counsellor); helping disadvantaged teenagers (by choice she had no children herself but helped other people's children instead); running a pub (I had my own business
). Here she is a Green Party member currently involved in writing the Greens' disability policy.
If you can laugh at your disability, that's half the battle. I am still in there with a chance,
she says. I have got a lot of energy and a story to tell. I feel I can make a contribution.
Want to know more?
If you need more information from the DPA National Secretariat on any item in Bites simply phone /ITTY us on (04) 801-9100, fax your request to (04) 801-9565, send it email: gen@dpa.org.nz, or to DPA (New Zealand) Inc, PO Box 27-524, Wellington or check our website www.dpa.org.nz.