A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. – Sir Winston Churchill

It’s 7: 09 PM on day 417 of my journey towards independence and I’ve managed to brush my teeth, publish my Disability of the Day feature,  tweet about my Clean Water For All Campaign – no luck – feed myself baked beans on toast for breakfast,  listen to music, go to physiotherapy–my physiotherapist was not impressed at all my lets were so stiff because I only exercised 3/14 days– watch TV, feed myself yoghurt for dinner and brush my teeth once more.

For the past few weeks I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of ways to keep this blog going while I’m in India with my family and yesterday when I met Jenelle Ramsami – a South Africa model who just happens to have a hearing impairment (see her picture and more about her below)– through Ramon Thomas via Twitter I knew that she would be the perfect person – inspiring, determined, confident – to write on this blog – I will be creating a ‘Guest Posts’ page just for her so that there is no confusion as to who is writing – while I was away so today I asked her if she would and she said yes the reason I’m SO excited that she agreed to do it is because she takes the dis right out of disabled by doing everything she does which is what I aim to do every day of my life. Do you see the opportunity in every difficulty or the difficulty in every opportunity?

Determined, intelligent and confident – these are all attributes that make Durban’s Jenelle who is an inspiration to those around her. Despite the fact that Jenelle was diagnosed with hearing loss at the age of 12, this has not stopped her from successfully becoming one of South Africa’s most inspiring up and coming models. In the last two years she has been a finalist in the Miss Deaf South Africa pageant, was awarded the ‘Fresh Look’ title at Miss India South Africa KZN 2010 contest, and recently made the Top 5 and ‘Miss photogenic’ for the Xtreme Models Search competition in February 2011. “I have always believed that modelling is a stepping stone to something greater for me. I want to motivate those who are both ably hearing and hearing impaired,” explains Jenelle. Achieving her goals is definitely not a foreign concept to this budding model. She was the first hearing impaired person in her school to pass her Matric with a merit and distinctions, thus enabling her to attend a mainstream college where she passed a national diploma in Business Management. It was this need to inspire and to show people that being hearing impaired is merely an obstacle that led Jenelle to becoming LifeSound’s newest ambassador & ambassador for House Of Tai Tei Lija (cosmestic)

Are we connecting on Twitter? If not, say hi at http://twitter.com/Nisha360

If you’ve given to my cause or you can’t give now, please help me by sharing my cause with others. You can tweet about it like my friend Stan Faryna. This is the tweet he uses: @Nisha360 is a brave, smart young woman trying to make a better world for us all. Please help her do an amazing thing. http://bit.ly/hC7vOu

Stan’s very sweet for saying so, but feel free to write what reflects you best.

Thanks to all my friends out there who are helping me make my dream come true: to make a better world for all of us!