The National Legislature should have been an advocacy place for the plight of the citizenry, including the disabled community, but this is not the case; as a result, a tough-talking disabled Representative-Aspirant of Montserrado County’s district #8, Samuel S. Dean, has vowed to fully represent his constituents and the entire disabled community of Liberia; writes Ojuku Silver-tongue Kangar, Jr.
Dean, who is on record for assisting people with disability, declared his intention in Jallah Town Hall over the weekend when he donated 25 bags of cement to Dehdeh Oscar, whose nine-bedroom house was gutted by fire recently.
“Mamie’s house got burned. l told Mamie l was going to rebuild it,” Dean said. “They are three houses l want to rebuild in this district: one here, one in Warwin community and another in Buzzy Quarter community.”
He used the platform to make a clarion call for more assistance to be rendered to Dehdeh Oscar.
“If any aspirant [is] listening, you can come in to build these people’s houses,” he said. “The 75 cement bags were intended for my own project, but I diverted them to the three affected people for humanity sake.”
Fire disaster in Liberia has frustrated several people. Recently, six persons were killed by fire in Montserrado County district #6 when their house got burned.
Dehdeh Oscar, known as Oldma Dehdeh, said since the fire nightmare, aspirant Dean is the second person coming to her aid.
“I thank you all plenty for the cement bags. [May] God bless you and your team, my son,” Oldma Dehdeh said. “The first person [who] came to my aid was Representative Gray. He gave me five bundles of zinc.”
She used the occasion to appeal for sticks, crushed rocks and sand to start the reconstruction of her burned domicile.
“I want God to touch people’s heart to help me with the other three important things to build my house again,” she said.
Samuel D. Dean, who vowed to prioritize agriculture and education if elected to the House of Representatives, decried the poor education status of the Liberian school system, noting that students are not achieving educationally.
“Every day on my porch l call students coming from school and check in their copybooks. I find out that their notes are not proper,” he said. “Liberia has a rich land but poor people. No need for government to give money to rice importers; it should give money to the farmers to produce more food instead.”
Dean, who manages the Florence A. Tolbert and the Disabled Advocates Incorporated (FATDA) since 2008, is said to have distributed over 15,000 units of Assistive Technology (AT) throughout Liberia, valued at US$5 million. A unit of AT is a pair of clutches, a wheelchair, a hearing aid, a white cane, a quad cane, a cane, spectacles and the works.
According to information, his other advocacies include staging a peaceful protest aimed at driving awareness of the socioeconomic disparity that exists between persons with disability and their non-disabled peers. Accordingly, because of this advocacy, the President ordered that each government ministry and agency hire at least two persons with disability.
