Prayatna Nepal is a nonprofit, non-religious and non-political women led organization established for the empowerment and rights promotion of women and girls with visual impairment. Since its establishment in 2015, Prayatna Nepal has been implementing various activities targeting to the visually impaired girls and women. Since Prayatna Nepal is the part of overall national and global disability rights movement, it has adopted the social and rights-based model of disability and the key motto of global disability rights movement “Nothing about us without us”. The organization is established by the composition of both women with and without visually impairments. Among the seven board members, five of them (71%) are with visually impairments where the organization is led by the totally blind woman as the Chairperson. This idea of inclusion in the organizational structure is to ensure equal efforts from every individual with better understanding in improving social, cultural, economic and political aspects of lives of women with disabilities.
The program was formally commenced by chairperson of Prayatna Nepal, Ms. Sarita Lamichhane, who highlighted the objectives of the program and asked everyone to introduce themselves. She then welcomed the facilitator of the day, Dr. Bijay Gyawali, senior clinical psychologist, who initially introduced himself and started his session by explaining how we create our own reality and behaviors based on our experiences of life.
The one-day workshop was basically focused on providing peer group support, in which Dr. Bijay provided some concrete and easy to follow tools for couples’ life. He studied the educational status and profile of participants and designed the topics of sessions accordingly by discussing with Prayatna Nepal team. He encouraged the participants to openly share their experiences, struggles and issues of marital as well as general life associated with their marriage and family. He listened to their stories and counseled them in the group to make them feel and understand the importance of making compromises in relationships and family life. Not only that, he also highlighted that good relationships can be sustained with proper communication, acceptance, respect and compromise. He also made the participants reflect upon conflict in family and measures that can be taken to solve them. He assured the participants that conflict resolution is a team work and that both husband and wife (in terms of marital relationships) should reach a middle point. Throughout his session, he guided the participant couples to share their personal feelings based on family and marital relationships, to which he tried to give them reasonable approaches/solutions.
At the end of the program, Ms. Sarita Lamichhane asked the participants to share their feelings about the session individually. After the sharing session, she thanked everyone for their participation and Dr. Bijay for his time and facilitation in the program.
