Adapted with permission from Only Natural Diamonds, by the Natural Diamond Council(IDEX Online) - More than four out of five diamond cutters at a center in Windhoek, Namibia, are disabled.Andr?? (C) Messika, a supplier of polished diamonds to the luxury jewelry market, employs 43 diamond cutters, 28 of whom are hearing impaired and eight polishers who are wheelchair users.Marc Friedman, operations director of the company, said they decided in 2009 to concentrate on employing disabled people and started by hiring a sign language specialist who they trained to cut and polish diamonds.By 2011 the first hearing-impaired recruits joined and were trained by the sign language specialist."We are not a charity and what we do helps our bottom line and at the same time gives a profession to those who have never had a job in their life," he said.The company is the biggest employer of the country's 100,000 disabled people of its population of just over 2 million. With high levels of unemployment in Namibia, it is particularly difficult for disabled people to find work.Diamond cutter Anna Marie Johnson (pictured) was paralyzed at the age of eight. Reliant on a wheelchair, she missed out on completing her education because of the stigma surrounding her challenging situation."When I was taken out of school in Grade 8, my dreams stopped," she said. "This is the end, I thought, there is nothing I can do, because who would employ a wheelchair girl who is disabled and not even educated."Anna Marie was one of the first recruits trained to become a professional diamond cutter and polisher, educated to operate at the highest international standards. She went through two years of training to achieve this standard in a profession that requires focus and physical stamina as well as a natural intuition."Finishing a stone is my biggest joy," said Anna Marie. "What I really like about our company is that they showed me that my disability is not an inability."The project began in 2007 when Schachter & Namdar - founding partner of the Andr?? (C) Messika facility - first set up operations in Namibia.