Able-bodied students experienced what it would be like to live with a disability on campus Monday afternoon.
The Disabled Student Affairs and the Student Recreation and Wellness Center teamed up to host various different activities by the Rec Center in an effort to raise awareness about the needs of disabled people.
Beverly Delarosa, secretary of disabled student affairs, put together the event and helped students as they participated in the activities.
“It’s important that we do disability awareness, and accept [disabled people] and include them in our everyday lives because we all can be affected by it,” Delarosa said.
The activities at the event were all meant to simulate a different disability that someone might have. Students were able to participate in blind soccer, lip reading charades, wheelchair navigation and buttoning clothes in order to simulate the loss of feeling and motor skills someone might experience after a stroke.
Odalys Gomez, a freshman speech pathology major, participated in blind soccer and the lip sync activity, and she said she enjoyed the event and would recommend it to other people.
“A lot of universities are modeling their recreation programs after ours, we modeled ours after Portland State, and now we are pretty much the second largest inclusive recreation program on the [West Coast],” Gomez said.
Gomez said that although the games were fun, living her life that way would be an everyday struggle.
“I would definitely recommend other people take part in this event because it is very eye-opening,” Gomez said. “It will make people more cautious and also willing to go out of their way to help disabled persons.”
Representatives from the SRWC were there as well to help out with the event.
Michael Freeman, the aquatics and inclusive recreation coordinator, noted that events like this and other inclusion programs that he runs have led the SRWC to become a model university recreation program for providing services to disabled persons.
“For students with disabilities or maybe even able bodied, we have a lot of programs that we put on to make those with disabilities feel more comfortable, and to give abled bodied people a different perspective” Freeman said.