By Cosmas Okoli

Hope and Possibilities Ride was primarily conceived as a tool for creating awareness to achieve the following:
1) Put issues of disabilities in the front burner of national discuss.
2) Promote polio eradication through creating awareness on the need for immunization of our children against preventable childhood diseases particularly Polio-myelitis.

3) Promote road safety through creating awareness on safe driving culture and road safety tips.
4) Promote our organizationfs plan to take our empowerment services to  persons with disabilities in Nigeria.
It is also a  public and international relations tool for would be sponsors and our country.

A foreign volunteer for Hope and Possibilities Ride Marij Colruyt from Belgium feels that this ride is what Nigeria needs at this time, given the fact that in the absence of compelling positive events, negative incidences take over the attention of the media generally. She feels strongly that part of the reason why Nigeria seems to be getting unfair share of negative publicity in the international media is because, there are not much of positive events that will attract positive publicity from the international media.

Marij said that when she informed her children that she would be taking them to Nigeria for summer holidays, the children were very excited about the trip. However, after a while, she noticed that the children were no longer as excited as they were when she first muted the idea. She did not know what might have dampened their moral until they were in Nigeria and the children were scared of moving around. She then realized that they had been feed with a lot of negative information about Nigeria. However, at the end of their visit, the children went home with a lot of sweet memories of Nigeria.

She was however very sad about the unfair negative perception about Nigeria in the international community because being a frequent visitor to Nigeria, she knows that Nigeria is not any less safe than most countries of Europe and America, and she wondered why there is so much negative news about Nigeria. She said that it was at this point that she realized what Hope and Possibilities Ride can do for Nigeriafs image abroad.

She said that in her effort to promote the ride abroad, she realized that it has been well received and a lot of people she has spoken to actually want to participate. She was however depressed when she returned to Nigeria and realized that we are still struggling with funding and she tried to help. She was astounded when she noticed that some Nigerians she spoke to about the project were not as enthusiastic as the foreigners.

I am convinced that Hope and possibilities Ride is what Nigeria needs at this time and that we can achieve so much with this project. An everyday activity does not make news, what makes positive news are unique and rare events that seem impossible to achieve.

This is what Hope and Possibilities represent,and I cannot also rule out the fact that because there is so much stigma associated with disabilities in Nigeria, some people are bound to think that this mission cannot be accomplished. For me, negative reactions like this tend to spur me to prove the pessimists wrong by pushing harder to accomplish my goal.

I want to remind us that in this country, persons with disabilities have consistently proven to find their way where able bodied persons seem to find no way. Take sports for example, right from their first outing in international sporting event, Nigerians with disabilities won medals. They have continued to win medals ever since while none disabled athletes are not doing so well.

This is not in any way to suggest that our none-disabled athletes are to blame for their poor performances…. However since the athletes with disabilities suffer even worse neglect and still manage to excel suggest that Nigeria should pay more attention to this segment of our society. Perhaps, our saving grace may lie with giving persons with disabilities an opportunity to contribute to our national development by giving issues of disabilities the attention they deserve.

I wish to say that if drifting as we have always done has continued to land us on detestable rocks, why canft we change and start swimming against the current?