04/09/24 – We began the second day of the Disability Policy Seminar taking part in a “rap session” led by Tia, who represents Self Advocates Becoming Empowered (SABE), the national self-advocacy organization. A few of us were able to tell other people in other states about the work we’re doing in Maine and what we hope to do once we visit our Congressional delegation on Capitol Hill. Ironically enough, our group was about to get a half-day head start on our work at the Capitol. Staffers for Jared Golden agreed to meet with us that afternoon since that was the only time they could fit us into their schedule because Golden’s wife had just had a baby recently. (HOO-RAH!) So after the SABE rap session ended, we all had to go back to our hotel rooms and get changed into our good clothes to meet with Golden’s staffers.
We left the hotel and went underground to pick up Metro passes for everyone so we could all ride the local subway to Union Station to grab some lunch. This was pretty exciting, I had never been on a subway before. This was something new and different to me, so I didn’t really know what to expect going into it. But I guess among those of us who had been on one before, some of us have had better experiences than others. So I decided I would sit with someone in our group who may not have had such a pleasant experience to try to reassure them in my own way that I wouldn’t let anything happen to them while we were on the subway.
We get off the subway at Union Station, and since we were all in our good clothes, we definitely wanted to keep them looking nice while we ate lunch, since we knew we were gonna need them again the next day. It also gave some of us a chance to take a quick look around at some spots we might have missed from Sunday. We noticed a portion of Union Station was sectioned off that wasn’t when we were there Sunday, and no one was able to give us a straight answer as to why. But I figured if someone wanted to know bad enough, they’d tune into the local news later that night to hear that story.
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