Ms Vo Thi Hoang Yen, Director of the Disability Research and Capacity Development Center (DRD), said: “Society today is built for the majority, while minority groups are not taken into account, including people with disabilities”.
Facing arduous barriers
Ai Giang is a student with a disability. She told of her first day at school, which was truly miserable because she had to push her hand-propelled wheelchair with great difficulty to find her school. Ai Giang said: “When I got to school, my grey shirt was soaked through with sweat. Exhausted, I looked up at the steps and no longer wanted to go up to class. What could I do! I just sat silently and waited”. And after waiting a long time, she finally waited for a group of kind friends to carry her up those dreadful steps into class.
The familiar steps that everyone usually sees in front of buildings, offices, schools… in big cities, which hardly anyone pays attention to, are a great inconvenience. But in reality, they are a huge barrier for so many people with mobility disabilities, and thousands of students with disabilities have had to end their education just because they could not “conquer” those steps every day.
And it is not just the steps. When people with disabilities go out, “barriers” lie thick before them: bumpy pavements, uneven kerbs, bars across entrances that stop wheelchairs entering parks, steps with no ramps… Those barriers make people with disabilities hesitate, and few dare to go out.
Flights of steps, steeply sloping pavements… are huge barriers preventing people with disabilities from going out
Ms Vo Thi Hoang Yen said: “Once, a group of Swedish students visited DRD and were surprised that, having toured Ho Chi Minh City for a whole week, they had hardly seen any people with disabilities. They were surprised because, from their books, they knew Vietnam had very many people with disabilities as a result of the war and chemical agents, but in reality they very rarely saw people with disabilities on the streets. That is no surprise! Because very few people with disabilities in Vietnam dare to go out”.
A world for everyone
On 1 December, DRD organised the A World for All festival at the Ho Chi Minh City Youth Culture House. At the festival, the organisers designed a very unusual competition: healthy young people practised using wheelchairs and overcoming simulated obstacles that people with disabilities often meet on the road. After the competition, every young person had to grimace at how hard it was to overcome these obstacles, even though they were all healthy young people with no disability at all.
According to Ms Vo Thi Hoang Yen, these are the obstacles people with disabilities face every day when they “dare” to go out to study, work and integrate into society. She was indignant that the state has clearly regulated that buildings must be constructed to standards so that people with disabilities can access them, but in reality very few places comply; they build only to serve the majority of healthy, non-disabled people, while minority groups, including people with disabilities, are ignored.
A 2012 DRD survey showed that, of 1,800 public facilities (hospitals, schools, restaurants, …) surveyed in Ho Chi Minh City, only 78 were built to standard and accessible to people with disabilities. Most of the rest “rejected” people with disabilities, with steps that were too high, pavements with no dropped kerbs for wheelchairs to get up and down, and no tactile guide strips for people with visual impairments…
Ms Vo Thi Hoang Yen said: “In the world today, there is no longer a special design standard for access by people with disabilities; they have gone a step further and build to international design standards, that is, design for everyone, including people with disabilities, older people, pregnant women, people who suddenly lose their health… But in our Vietnam, even the standard for people with disabilities has not yet been implemented”.
According to her, the United Nations International Convention takes as the theme of this year’s International Day of People with Disabilities (3/12) “Removing barriers, opening doors for an inclusive world for all”. She therefore hopes this message will spread more widely in Vietnam and attract more public attention, helping to remove barriers so that people with disabilities can boldly and confidently step out into society and integrate into the community.
According to dantri.com.vn