Monday, July 19, 2004 Editorial: A heart for the disabled
DON’T text your secrets to Catherine Unger.
Unger, 21, is visually-impaired. She has committed to memory the keypad of her mobile phone but has to rely on a friend to read aloud the text messages sent to her.
As Unger quips, she can’t keep secrets because technology—which grants anyone now the freedom to roam information space or customize their phones—has not yet mainstreamed the disabled. Yet, it is not only technology that keeps the differently-abled in the backwater isolating “special” or marginalized sectors.
For failing to improve the access of persons with disabilities (PWDs) to education and jobs, society should review more soberly its own inadequacies and the work to be done so that National Disability Prevention and Rehabilitation Week, observed from July 17 to 23 this year, becomes more than an annual litany of failed expectations and aborted pledges to PWDs.
Blinders
Twelve years after the Magna Carta for Disabled Persons was passed, PWDs are still better described as suspended in their development, rather than fully emancipated and self-reliant.
According to Amor Flores, officer-in-charge of the Cebu Braille Center Inc. (CBCI), financial need and unenlightened perceptions act as blinders preventing some families from availing themselves of the free assistance given by institutions like CBCI. Flores says many parents are fatalistic about their sight- or hearing-impaired children’s chances in school or in the workplace. Prioritized for schooling are the PWDs’ normally-abled siblings as they are expected to fare better in the job market and contribute more to family funds.
Unger, though, pleads for more parental empathy and foresight. At the age of seven, she was visiting her opthalmologist’s clinic when a CBCI worker approached her grandmother. However, no effort was made to take up the invitation to enroll Unger in free Braille classes. CBCI workers finally contacted and convinced Unger’s mother to enroll the child, now eight, in the preschool equivalent of Braille lessons.
By the age of nine, Unger was considered sufficiently proficient with the writing device that allows the visually impaired to read and write. CBCI facilitated her “mainstreaming,” enrolling her in classes with regular students. The Bachelor of Arts sophomore at the Cebu Normal University (CNU) is now majoring in English, borne out of a love for analyzing sentence patterns.
Sanctuaries
Flores observes that gaining their family’s support is just the first hurdle. PWDs have to look for a school that welcomes them and their “special” needs in learning.
Given that the disabled have to muster considerable resources to master the challenges of schooling—from the basic requirement of commuting to school and finding classrooms, to instructional prerequisites like having references and assignments transposed in Braille--educational institutions shirking from the accessibility provisions provided for in the Magna Carta for Disabled Persons are the rule rather than the exception.
Flores says that, in the vacuum left by the overseas exodus of special education (Sped) teachers, other instructors in both public and private institutions harbor deep biases and reservations that they have neither the time nor competency to teach one or two disabled students, aside from their regular load or overload.
The problem is more critical in public school classes, where PWDs compete with about 60 other students for the teacher’s attention. CBCI offers many services to assist their PWD clientele, Flores observes, but there is only itinerant teacher Elvie Bayubay, who personally visits the students or confers with their teachers in all levels at the handful of local academic institutions that have remained accessible to the disabled.
Flores cites more scholarships, tuition privileges in private schools, and increased government and private funding for advocacy and outreach work as necessary to lift the barriers that have kept the disabled from fully developing their potentials.
For Unger, who has grown up and thrived in the “kind” CNU community that she considers as her adopted home, the pulse that connects PWDs with the rest of society is sustained by families, mentors and peers who embrace them, even if their disability makes them poor at keeping secrets.
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