THERE is a cry for the State to do more for the physically disabled.

Speaking recently at a meeting of the Corporate Area-based Rotary Club of Trafalgar New Heights, held in observance of Rotary International’s Foundation Month, Don Taylor, a polio survivor and counsellor at the Sir John Golding Rehabilitation Centre in St Andrew, said many people with physical disabilities in Jamaica are poorly educated and lack access to basic services because of their inability to get into most buildings.

“You are familiar with the Jamaica Society for the Blind, the Jamaica Association for the Deaf and the Jamaica Association for Intellectual Disabilities. There has not been an association for persons with physical disabilities,” Taylor, who is the general secretary of a small two-year-old, unregistered group named the Jamaica Association of Persons with Physical Disabilities (JAPPD), stated.

“There is School for the Blind; School for the Deaf and School of Hope for the intellectually impaired but no special school for us.  We have to go to the regular schools. Many physically disabled persons are uneducated for one simple reason – they can’t go into the school,” he emphasised.

The Planning Institute of Jamaica indicates that more than six per cent of the population is physically disabled, although world reports indicate that the figure could be higher.

According to Taylor, the average school in Jamaica is built with steps, a design emerging from the colonial era to raise the school above ground to make it cooler. However, steps make the school building inaccessible to people with physical disabilities, especially for those people who must use a wheelchair for mobility.

“The average high school in Jamaica is two or three two-storey buildings going down a hillside. So those who can’t climb steps can’t go to school,” he underscored, noting that the Sir John Golding Rehabilitation Centre has been the only place designed to rehabilitate the physically disabled.

Taylor had received his primary education there after contracting poliomyelitis during one of the early outbreaks in the 1950s.

Poliomyelitis, according to the World Health Organisation, is a highly infectious viral disease, which mainly affects young children. The virus is transmitted by person-to-person spread mainly through the faecal-oral route or, less frequently, by a common vehicle (for example, contaminated water or food) and multiplies in the intestine – from where it can invade the nervous system and can cause paralysis.

Taylor says they hope to register the association soon, to be better able to increase advocacy efforts on behalf of the physically disabled, including stepping up pressure against businesses and institutions which fail to maintain designated parking spaces for people with disabilities. However, beyond that, the association wants more to ease the living conditions of people with physical disabilities.

He mentioned that the JAPPD has been mandated to take over the management of the Cheshire Village. They have put in place a management committee, which will soon assume the full responsibility for the village. He says the units, which consist of four bedrooms, have only one bathroom and one kitchen area, but says in some instances, one bedroom may be occupied by as many as six people. His association wants to expand the units by adding an additional bathroom and possibly another kitchen to each unit, to eventually transform most of the units into duplex accommodations to house two families.

Taylor says since the 21-unit Cheshire complex was built in the 1970s, very little has been done to improve the units so the committee will be working to raise funding to repair and then to modify the homes.

“Recently the driveway was resurfaced, for which the residents are most grateful, and a few houses have had people come in to assist with tiling and so on, but the whole complex needs to be looked after,” he says.