Friday, December 22, 2006

A voice for Singapore's disabled


Since I'm officially one toe short on one leg, I think I qualify as spokesman...

It made the news this year that the buses are going to become disabled/wheelchair friendly. They will have steps that will lower to road level so that wheelchair-bound commuters can get their wheels on board.

Well, big freakin' deal. Isn't it about time?? My human was in the US 20 years ago and saw such buses back there then. The disabled - be they on crutches, calipers, wheelchairs, whatever - were out and about. She even wondered idly whether the US had a higher incidence of disabilities.

There is no reason for any one country to have more disabled people than another, one would suppose - unless you are talking about Vietnam, where the current generation is still being born with twisted limbs, courtesy of the after effects of Agent Orange sprayed liberally to kill the country's forest to deny the Vietcong of hiding places... but that is another story.

Singapore has its fair share of people with disabilities, all right, but it's now clear that they have been cooped up at home all these past decades. Did they have a choice, when navigating the big outdoors meant coming up against curbs, flights of stairs and public transport that didn't welcome them?

The MRT system is 20 years old - but the stations were only recently retrofitted with lifts to take the disabled onto the platforms. Why wasn't it built to accommodate these people in the first place? They are members of our society too.

So much for being a first-world nation. Singapore only has the trappings of being one.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Toe update!

I'm healing well. The fur is coming back on what looks like my "sockless" leg. I heard Auntie S telling my human last week that I'm "eating well" too, so things are peachy.

Or it could mean I'm getting even fatter - and setting myself up for more fat jokes. I still haven't gotten over the trauma of taking a little longer to come out of the anaesthetic after my toe amputation because the dope was stuck in my fat layers, saith the vet.

*Hrmph!*

It's the year-end and my human has just returned from her holiday. Maybe that's why she's been incommunicado. *&^%. Guess if I were still living under her roof, I'd have just returned from "holiday" as well - at the Pet Hotel. Yuck.