First 100 Days of the 44th President Barack Obama and International Deaf Community

Hello Newly Readers,

First and foremost, I want to thank Leah Katz-Hernandez for allowing me to share my stories about the Inauguration days, here and, showing me the rope in the blogosphere world. What an exciting and an incredible learning experience it was for me! Basically, I am very excited to work with Leah as she is currently taking International Government classes, and will be sharing some of her academic perspectives in these blog/vlog segments.

So many of you are probably wondering why I call you newly readers. It is simply because, during the Inauguration days, I posted my blogs entries, you have read about my experiences of witnessing the historical Inauguration through my participation in the University Presidential Inauguration Conference (UPIC) in Washington, DC, a few weeks ago. Today, I welcome you again to a new blog segment forum which I will discuss about the First 100 days of Obama Presidency and the importance of addressing International Disability Laws issues.

Let’s start with Obama’s First 100 Days of Presidency. This is an important time-span for a newly incoming President Obama who will be “graded” based on his presidential performance at strictly confronting the economic crisis and at aggressively pressing for his massive economic recovery plan during his administration. Since the economy will have an undue burden on his incoming administration, his first 100 days are important as he will have the opportunity to prove to us, Americans, that the rest of his term will be successful. “Obama wants to alleviate our struggles and advance our dreams so that we can prosper and grow as proud U.S. citizens living in American states.”

In dealing with our economy crisis, he has outlined several goals:

-Make the financial sectors work well with managing the retirement benefits for senior citizens and college loans for students in America.

-Create millions of jobs for Americans backed with retirement and pension fund packages.

-Bolster banks and corporations back into the financial systems by refinancing the American families, students and employees.

“Transferring from a transition from a chaotic world to a peaceful world is difficult and requires persons’ support and transferring from a transition from an ignorant world to a compassionate world requires people to understand the people with disabilities.’’

Moving forward with Obama during these transitions requires us to have focus, determination and assertiveness qualities in facing these difficult changes. In addressing these changes, I wanted to mention that our international disability laws are being ignored and being abandoned. It is through our international petition collecting and legislation making processes, and with speaking to United Nations Disability Convention Representatives about our rights for making American Sign Language (ASL) another primary language and making interpreting services accessibly and legally; only then, we can move forward in advancing ourselves in this today's fast-paced and ever-changing economic society. This will be discussed later in the next context.

Additionally, I would like to outline some goals that I wish to achieve in this blog. -Fundraising---to earn money to expand existing blog webpage into a multi-dimensional international webpage which would reach out to the international community for support in addressing the legal changes in international disability rights issues.

-Petition collecting—to convince the UN Disability Convention to make ASL as part of the foreign language in the UN missions and goal initiatives.

-Requesting accessibility--- to call for UN Disability Convention to provide interpreting services for employment opportunities, traveling opportunities for tourists, and studying abroad opportunities for students overseas.

-Conduct informative interviews---to reach out to prominent people with successful stories at press conferences and events related to the news and media, politics and international diplomacy and security.

We need the international Deaf community to be active in collecting petitions in order to call for actions in reenacting the international disability laws which protects the rights of deaf and hard of hearing individuals in having equal partnering access in work, study and travel opportunities worldwide. Receiving reasonable accommodation in the international Deaf community helps to strengthen the economy by pushing the government to reduce poverty, illiteracy, homelessness, and unemployment issues that so often prevail within the with the International Deaf communities. By requesting the UN Disability Convention to provide quality and reasonable services, we are able to live up to our responsibilities to shoulder and shoulder with the government in eliminating these unnecessary tax-dollars spending associated with the establishing of government provisions.

Without your support for this cause, we cannot make international traveling, working and studying more accessible and more enjoyable experiences for many of YOU---so, this is the website for all of us to start with. Please feel free to leave comments or share your thoughts with us.

As always may you continue to be with us for a more joyous first term of 2009 and best wishes!

Toronja-