STUMBLING BLOCK

Costly process to access wheelchair donation

 

 
President of the Barbados Council for the Disabled, Maria Holder-Small, is more than grateful for the over 200 wheelchairs and mobile devices which had been donated to the institution which she heads, but charged that the process to obtain these gifts was too difficult.
 
Speaking to the media on the sidelines of the presentation, Holder-Small stated, “The biggest challenge was the fees that we incurred. We would have sent off the letter to the Minister of Finance asking for a waive on the VAT because we are not able to pay it and it happened that ended up around the time of the budget so that week was a stall… bearing in mind that all this time the…fees are adding up, the FAS is also adding, Port Storage is also adding, so by the time we did get the waiver from the Ministry, we were also hit with the two per cent the very next day.”
 
Holder-Small stated that when they again reached out to the Ministry of Finance about the two per cent levy, they were told that no exemptions are being given and so, the council made the decision to pay due to the fees that were adding up. 
 

Another issue which arose for the council was that of obtaining containers to store their donations. The President noted that due to space limitations and with the permission of Town and Country Planning, they acquired a 20 foot container, hoping to place the surplus of what came in the 40 foot container in the rooms at the council.

 

Unfortunately, the rooms were overflowing, and the request to place another 20 foot container on the premises of the Council was denied. Moreover, the Council has three months to clear the container and remove it from the premises.

 

“I thought it would have been a much smoother process than the unnecessary humps that we came upon; because we are not gaining anything from this project, just the satisfaction of seeing people being seated in a wheelchair correctly,” stated Holder-Small.

 

Given these events Holder-Small noted that enacted legislation is needed. “We signed on to the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities but we don’t have the legislation, and until then, nothing can happen,” she stated. “Nothing is going to make any sense to persons unless they are affected by it. If it does not hit home, it does not make any sense to you. Trust me, a lot of us did not always have disabilities and disability is something just waiting to happen. We have a lot of non-communicable diseases out there, you can get up one day and become an amputee, you never know,” she said in her closing statement.

 

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